TizenTube for Windows

YouTube's TV interface as a desktop app, driven by a game controller.

It opens youtube.com/tv in an Electron window, sends a TV user-agent so YouTube serves the 10-foot Leanback UI instead of the desktop site, and injects TizenTube to strip ads and add SponsorBlock and DeArrow. Plug in an Xbox pad and it behaves like a TV app.

The ad-blocking, SponsorBlock and DeArrow work is all TizenTube's, by Reis Can. This project is the Windows shell around it — controller input, display handling, and a settings overlay. If you find it useful, sponsor him, not me.

Install

Download the installer or the portable build from Releases.

The binaries aren't code-signed, so SmartScreen will warn you on first run — More info → Run anyway. Check your download against SHA256SUMS.txt first if you'd rather not take my word for it.

To run from source:

npm install
npm start

npm run dist builds both the installer and the portable exe.

Controls

Button	Does
D-pad / left stick	Navigate
A	Select
B	Back
X	Play/pause
Y	Search
LB / RB	Seek back/forward in the player
Right stick up / down	Volume up / down
R3 (right stick click)	Mute / unmute
RT / LT	Volume up / down
Start	Settings overlay
Back/View	Toggle fullscreen

The D-pad and stick both navigate, with a configurable repeat rate. Everything except the D-pad can be remapped in config.json (including VolumeUp, VolumeDown, and VolumeMute).

Keyboard works too: arrows, Enter, Esc, Space, F11 fullscreen, F2 overlay, F5 reload, and volume controls (Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down, Ctrl+M mute, and media keys).

The settings overlay (Start, or F2) has a live controller tester — useful for checking a pad is seen at all, and for tuning stick deadzone without guessing. It's navigable with the pad: D-pad to move, left/right to adjust sliders, A to flip a toggle or press a button.

Signing in

Choose Sign in in the sidebar. YouTube shows a short code — enter it at youtube.com/activate on your phone. This is the normal TV device-linking flow, so it sidesteps Google's blocking of embedded browsers, and the login persists.

Getting 4K

Two things have to be right, and both are set up by default:

The user-agent. YouTube decides what to offer from the device it thinks it's talking to. Measured against the same video on the same machine:

Profile	Offered
ps4 (default)	2160p60 down to 240p
tizen-legacy	720p and below, hard capped
Android TV	redirects to the desktop site, unusable

Change it with system.userAgentProfile — ps4, cobalt, lg-webos, tizen-legacy, or custom with your own string in system.userAgent.

The viewport. YouTube picks its stream from the player's size in CSS pixels, so Windows display scaling quietly costs you resolution — a 4K panel at 150% reports as 2560×1440. The app runs with --force-device-scale-factor=1 to render at the panel's real resolution.

Run it fullscreen. Windowed, the player is small enough that YouTube drops to a lower rung no matter what user-agent you send.

TizenTube's own menu (Settings → Video Player) can force a specific quality and codec. Note that picking anything other than Auto pins the player to exactly that rung, so leave it on Auto unless you want a hard lock.

Configuration

%APPDATA%\tizentube-windows\config.json, written on first run. Most of it is reachable from the overlay; the rest is worth editing by hand:

• controller.deadzone — stick drift threshold, default 0.25
• controller.repeatIntervalMs — navigation repeat while held, default 110
• controller.bindings — per-button actions
• controller.vibration — rumble on button presses and navigation
• display.autoHideCursor, display.preventDisplaySleep
• audio.volume, audio.muted — playback volume level (0.0–1.0) and mute state
• updates.autoCheck — look for a newer app version on startup
• system.userAgentProfile — see above

Updating

Two separate things update, and they work differently.

The app checks this project's GitHub releases on startup and downloads a newer build in the background, then offers to restart. Choosing Later installs it the next time you quit. Turn it off with updates.autoCheck, or from the overlay.

This only works for the installed build. A portable exe cannot replace itself while running, and a dev checkout has no release to compare against; both skip the check and say so in the log. The installers are not code-signed, so Windows may ask you to confirm the update.

The bundled TizenTube userscript does not update at runtime. It is pinned by SHA-256 and ships inside the build, so it changes only when a new release is cut

• see below. autoUpdateScript controls whether a mismatched bundle may be re-fetched, not whether the pin moves on its own.

Userscript pinning

The bundled TizenTube script runs with full Node privileges, so it's pinned to an exact release and checked by SHA-256 before it's written to disk or executed:

"scriptVersion":  "1.14.8",
"scriptSha256":   "0b535d9a870f9905a8b9d399d92453cb463ff35d1a9750b8f6cbe6ee60306108",
"cdnUrlTemplate": "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@foxreis/tizentube@{version}/dist/userScript.js"

A download that doesn't match is rejected and never written. The cached copy is re-hashed every launch and quarantined on mismatch. The bundled file is the pinned release, so a normal install never fetches anything.

To move to a newer TizenTube:

npm run pin-script -- 1.14.9   # or `latest`

That downloads it, replaces the bundle, and updates both config fields together so they can't drift apart. npm test verifies they still match.

Licence

GPL-3.0-only — see LICENSE.

This is not a fork of TizenTube. Everything under src/main, src/preload and src/renderer is original. It does redistribute one third-party file: src/scripts/tizentube-bundle.js is the unmodified dist/userScript.js from TizenTube v1.14.8 (npm @foxreis/tizentube), GPL-3.0-only. Because that script runs inside this app's process, the combined work is GPL-3.0-only too.

See NOTICE.md for full attribution and disclaimers.

Not affiliated with Google, YouTube, Samsung, the Tizen project, or TizenTube.