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Cobalt is the primary engine that's used for running YouTube and YouTube TV on set-top boxes and smart TVs. If you notice that it looks the same on a Roku device or a Fire TV stick or a Samsung TV, that's because all of those are running a port of Cobalt and a special version of the YouTube website.

discuss

captn3m0|3 years ago

The special version of YouTube TV is accessible still by changing your user-agent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945542

jeffbee|3 years ago

Interesting! I wonder if this is why the YouTube webOS app is 55MB while something like Hulu is 220KB. I believe the latter is just HTML that targets the webOS browser.

The YouTube app is the only one, along with Netflix, that is smooth and usable on this platform. Amazon Prime video is a jankfest (and their app is 100MB) and Apple TV+ is a slideshow.

hdhdxkfchsk|3 years ago

that explains why it is "striped down" but still havefull DRM support.

https://html5test.com/s/f95f2b5e8ee2ce08.html

no form elements tho?!?

matvp|3 years ago

How would one ship a full engine with an app on an OTT device? I've built a few TV apps but they all relied on the browser engines shipped with webOS and Tizen.