Youtube TV

Trying to clean my bookmarks (again) i found three entries dealing with this. Thats a lot for a simple tip. So a post it is.

Maybe you want to run the Youtube TV experience from your computer. The same that Smart TVs and consoles have. But you cant, because they will redirect you to the homepage.

Lucky us a reddit post has the answer. You have to change your user-agent.

To do this in Firefox, you have to go to about:config and make a new property called general.useragent.override and use the value Mozilla/5.0 (PS4; Leanback Shell) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0 LeanbackShell/01.00.01.75 Sony PS4/ (PS4, , no, CH)

Maybe you could also set to true the property dom.allow_scripts_to_close_windows to allow closing the tab with the exit functionality, but i didnt need it.

Another idea is to make a new profile with this settings and an alias just to run it on its own in a fullscreen manner.

alias youtube_tv='firefox -profile "path to profile" -no-remote -new-window --kiosk "https://youtube.com/tv"'

If you use chrome, you could do it with the following command

google-chrome-stable --kiosk --enable-extensions --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (PS4; Leanback Shell) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0 LeanbackShell/01.00.01.75 Sony PS4/ (PS4, , no, CH)" https://www.youtube.com/tv

If you only want the user-agent string, here it is

Mozilla/5.0 (PS4; Leanback Shell) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0 LeanbackShell/01.00.01.75 Sony PS4/ (PS4, , no, CH)