Newpipe: Replicating YoutubeKids

[licaon-kter]

Is the (that) age restriction an accessible metadata?

FYI: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.kids

Thanks

[doctormo]

Actually this could be done better than YouTubeKids that has a whole boat full of it's own problems.

What we need is some way of creating pooled subscriptions and being able to set a hard limit on NewPipe only being able to play videos from that pool. The actual part where parents would vet videos and tag them into the pool could be separate, but it sure would be nice to get away from AI automated nonesense and use peer-review collaboration which open source is known for fostering.

[ghost]

Maybe if they developed this other feature request the problem would be solved #1243

[doctormo]

I wanted to add something else too: YouTube wants users to watch as many videos as possible, one after another. Their suggested next video and auto play are all about getting people to watch more adverts. This is one reason why YouTubeKids, and certainly YouTube itself suffers from suggesting utter garbage to kids. NewPipe does not need to concern itself with any of that business model though and should not use the same patterns to show videos.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[licaon-kter]

Hey bot Y U not fix it then :) :)

[ghost]

Close this

[gkeegan]

This might actually be achievable, and could be a handy feature to include.

[opusforlife2]

Fixed by #2727?

[licaon-kter]

@opusforlife2 age restrict covers 18+ right?

[opusforlife2]

A cursory online search seems to suggest that this is for parents to use for their kids. No idea about the facts, which is why I posed it as a question.

[licaon-kter]

Kids means under 18?

Youtube Kids has more age options, 3,6,12, smth.

[opusforlife2]

Ah. Alright.

[wb9688]

@licaon-kter: Ah, AFAIK YouTube only marks 18+

[licaon-kter]

@wb9688 so where does the Kids app pulls ratings from?

[Stypox]

@licaon-kter it probably runs on a different API providing more detailed age-restriction data, but as wb9688 said this is not the case for standard YouTube, so this will not come to NewPipe unfortunately (feel free to reopen if more information is found ;-) )

[wb9688]

If you could provide an URL of a video that's allowed to be watched by e.g. 3yo kids in YT Kids, I could take a look if we're missing any such metadata

[mmaximo]

I'm interested in this topic also.
Could NewPipe get its videos from YT kids site https://www.youtubekids.com/?
Would it be easier to implement?

[Stypox]

@mmaximo that would probably be doable, if someone is willing to implement it as a service.

[wb9688]

@mmaximo: I didn't know that was a thing, but yeah, that's possible.

[TobiGr]

This runs on a different API.
Some details:
corpusPreference (i.e. age groups):

• KIDS_CORPUS_PREFERENCE_PRESCHOOL (0-4 years)
• KIDS_CORPUS_PREFERENCE_YOUNGER (5-7)
• KIDS_CORPUS_PREFERENCE_OLDER (8-12)

enabled_categories (i.e. allowed video categories):

• "approved_for_you",
• "camp",
• "collections",
  
  
  
  • "explore", (based on watch history)
  
  
  • "favorites", (based on watch history)
  
  
  • "gaming",
  
  
  • "learning",
  
  
  • "move",
  
  
  • "music",
  
  
  • "reading",
  
  
  • "shows",
  
  
  • "spotlight"
  
  

Example request body: younger, no search

{
  "context": {
    "client": {
      "clientName": "WEB_KIDS",
      "clientVersion": "2.1.0",
      "hl": "en-GB",
      "gl": "DE",
      "experimentIds": [],
      "experimentsToken": "",
      "browserName": "Firefox",
      "deviceMake": "mozilla",
      "browserVersion": "79.0",
      "deviceModel": "firefox",
      "osName": "X11",
      "platform": "DESKTOP",
      "kidsAppInfo": {
        "contentSettings": {
          "corpusPreference": "KIDS_CORPUS_PREFERENCE_YOUNGER",
          "kidsNoSearchMode": "YT_KIDS_NO_SEARCH_MODE_ON"
        },
        "categorySettings": {
          "enabledCategories": [
            "approved_for_you",
            "camp",
            "collections",
            "explore",
            "favorites",
            "gaming",
            "learning",
            "move",
            "music",
            "reading",
            "shows",
            "spotlight"
          ]
        }
      }
    },
    "capabilities": {},
    "request": {
      "internalExperimentFlags": []
    }
  },
  "browseId": "FEkids_home"
}

[wb9688]

@TobiGr: Of course the requests for YouTube Kids are different. Note how in YT Music and new YT continuations, which seems similar, certain fields in the JSON are optional. This will need to be implemented in a way similar to that WIP PR for Invidious.

[eladkarako]

Could NewPipe get its videos from YT kids site https://www.youtubekids.com/?

Keep in-mind that youtubekids.com is not available for all of the countries,
this is done by IP, regardless of user preference of language or location.

Unless you want NewPipe to proxy things ^{(note: this would be awesome!)},
enforcing safe-search (f2=8000000 cookie based) is the common (not perfect!) way of handling things.

Google used to have a unit test to check just that.

Some security-applications (McAfee) used to also inspect the returned HTML for string of "restrict mode off" or something like that, YouTube is no longer write the state in the HTML (raw or DOM) and we don't actually crawl the HTML anyway.

---

There is a alternative way to force a safe search,
as explained in here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en
(in the Linux section),
you ping forcesafesearch.google.com and get one of the machine's IP,
for example 216.239.38.120,
and then you "override" the DNS entry for www.google.com (and possibly other country-domains as well) in your HOSTS file:

216.239.38.120 www.google.com
#216.239.38.120 www.google.co.uk
#216.239.38.120 www.google.ru
#216.239.38.120 www.google.co.il

so websites that uses www.google.comIt would naturally resolve to the machine IP that Google search results (not sure if that includes YouTube) is always restricting the content, regardless of a user-settings.

I Don't know if this solution can be adjusted in anyway to NewPipe (in the way video search-queries are done), but it is worth mentioning since it is a solution that pipes through Google first, so you don't need to implement any client-side solutions.

[mmaximo]

There is a alternative way to force a safe search,
as explained in here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en

Yes, I already do something like that. I use family-friendly dns servers from Cloudflare and Cleanbrowsing on my children devices.

But the thing is that, if you believe Google, YT Kids' content is not only restricted, but curated.
I haven't seen any inappropriate video popping up, something that I've witnessed even on restricted YouTube .

Thanks anyway

[eladkarako]

Of course YTK is better,
I guess NewPipe can check if it is available,
and improve (- replace.) the results of the currently safe-search results with the one from YTK.
And in case YTK is not available just fallback to the normal way.

This can be implemented as an additional (for example) menu entry of 'try using YouTube-Kids when available' that becomes available whenever the 'safe-search' option is turned on.

---

just fyi, DNS is for blocking whole (sub)domains.

Overriding "google.com" is something else entirely in here:
you are opt-in to use a specific server(s) from Google that has a slightly modified 'search service' deployed on it by Google, that totally ignores the user-settings (in user-account or cookies) and always return a safe-result-list.

Being free from cookies/settings/user-account is what made me suggest it to NewPipe,
since it does not required any pre-authentication of any kind.