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[6233638]

https://www.youtube.com/tv
 
I'm wondering if this might be the solution to "fixing" YouTube in Theater View.
Increasingly, there seem to be problems with downloading/viewing YouTube content in Media Center.
 
Now I really appreciate the ability to easily download a 720p video that I can watch offline - in fact it's actually saved me a couple of times when I have wanted to refer back to something, and it has been removed from YouTube for reasons unknown.
 
But people trying to use YouTube in Theater View often seem to be using it for music videos, and that's where you frequently run into copyright restrictions, as the videos require Media Source Extensions to be supported so that they can play ads.
 
 
The solution for this seems to be YouTube's TV website.
It brings up a nice TV-friendly interface for YouTube that is easily navigable with a remote.
And better yet, it can be paired to another device (e.g. a smartphone) so that people can queue up videos to watch on the TV via the YouTube app or a web browser.
 
 
On the plus side - at least as far as I am concerned - this pairing is randomized every time you launch the site.
But this does mean having to navigate to the pairing option every time you launch the site. (perhaps it would be possible to launch at the "pair" page?)
 
The downsides are that this would no longer be going through Media Center's processing chain, and right now at least, it doesn't appear to be working inside MC for me at all. (Internet Explorer engine on Windows 8.1)
 
But I wonder if it might help reduce these support issues.
I'm certainly not asking for the old YouTube support to be stripped out - I use it all the time, and have little interest in using the YouTube TV site, but I thought it might help for people trying to watch music videos via MC.

[Matt]

I just get:
"YouTube on TV is not supported on this device."

When I visit that page on my work computer.

[leezer3]

You need a very recent version of IE or Chrome, not Firefox at the moment. (The internet suggests that the nightlies for Firefox will work, but I'm not going down that route at the moment...)

Loads from Theatre view with both browser engines, but laggy as heck  ?

-Leezer-

[Hendrik]

Works OK-ish in both the IE and Chromium engine inside MC, but not sure how well we could integrate it into the fullscreen Theater View experience.
Performance is OK, but not excellent. Not sure our browser control is designed for such websites at the moment...

[6233638]

Yes, it's not currently working optimally inside Media Center right now.
In IE11 it works very well for me, and I've actually been using that instead of Media Center when people are over and want to play stuff on the TV.
 
It's not the highest quality (doesn't seem to load 1080p videos here, though that may be specific to my setup?) but works really well as a way for people to queue up videos from their own devices, and it has no problem playing content from channels like Vevo.
And of course this can be passed through Media Center with the WDM driver.
 
I don't know how much work it would require to integrate that into MC, but it seemed like it may be a possible solution.