How I Control What Media My Kids Watch Using Tube Archivist
Take control of what your kids watch at home with Tube Archivist. Your self hosted Youtube media server.
If you have kids that are 3 years or older, you know that having media for them to watch during work hours is essential to having peace and quiet while you work from home. Letting them run wild on YouTube was a no go for us. I needed something that I could have more control over so they can't watch things they shouldn't be watching.
My 6 year old son LOVES Minecraft so I needed a solution that would allow him to watch Minecraft content that my wife and I approved of. Enter Tube Archivist. This application has changed the way our kids watch content in our home.
Tube Archivist is a self hosted solution to download and privately watch your favorite subscriptions and channels on YouTube without the ads and distractions of other garbage content. It also doubles as a way to keep kids out of your hair for as long as you let them use it!
Tube Archivist lets you pick and choose what channels you want to download. You can set it up for either manual or automatic downloads. The fact that I can go in and scan the channels to see what new videos are available was the big decision maker for me. Tube Archivist lets you have complete control over what content you want to save.
Videos can be served up through Plex, Emby or even the native video player built into Tube Archivist. I have a first gen Echo Show 8 in the "play room" that the kids can use to watch videos directly from the Tube Archivist web app on the network using the Echo Show's built in Silk browser. This is all hosted on my Proxmox server with Docker.
I added a Silk book mark so the kids can easily say "Echo, open Silk", tap the bookmark and start watching videos on Tube Archivist. It's just as easy to setup a shortcut on tablets and other devices.
Maybe you have kids and want to have more control over what they watch? Or maybe you want to learn more about self hosting and have been looking for an application like Tube Archivist for other purposes. Either way, it's an amazing application and I highly recommend donating if you find this as useful as I have.
If you want to setup Tube Archivist for yourself, I recommend checking out this video by Ibracorp below!
