How to Watch The Adam Friedland Show (or any YouTube video) on a CRT TV

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I also have recently gotten into using a CRT TV. It is my only TV — a compromise between having no TV and having a normal TV, which I find too distracting, and also an unsettling presence in a room when it is off: a giant black rectangle. However, I found watching YouTube on a CRT to be surprisingly difficult, and struggled to find guides, which mostly focus on retro gaming. I will be using The Adam Friedland Show as an example, which looks especially nice on a CRT due to its 4:3 aspect ratio.

The best base tool I have found for connecting to a CRT is the Nintendo Wii. I control it with a plugged in Gamecube controller. It has a few advantages: the composite output works by default and is really good, it is relatively cheap to acquire (use eBay), and it has a pretty active homebrew/hacking community. It has some disadvantages, like that a lot of the software is abandonware, but I found it easier to set up than the alternatives.

Alternative 1: HDMI to RCA. I got a cheap converter online, and the quality was terrible, and it didn't look into this further. Supposedly there are HDMI -> RCA Downscalers that don't compromise on quality, but I read mixed reviews online didn't test any of the more expensive options. If you're able to get this working, please let me know.

Alternative 2: Raspberry Pi. Getting this to output RCA was a huge pain, and I found myself digging through old forum posts trying to figure out what magic combination of configuration variables would work. Furthermore, it required using a keyboard and mouse — to get a remote control working would require even more hacking.

In order to get your Wii playing video, you will need to hack it a bit. Setting this up is outside the scope of this guide, but is relatively straightforward and can be explained here. I use WiiMC as my media player. While it hasn't been updated in 12 years, it still works fine for me.

To get my video, I first use yt-dlp to download from YouTube. We can use this yt-dlp command to automatically give us the best-quality video and audio available for a 480p video:

yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[height=480]+bestaudio" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGsy-v71R9I -o tafs-amandaknox

This will generally be an av1 or vp9 encoded video. However, the Wii media player I use does not have vp9 and av1 support. This means I must transcode the video to h.264. We don't want to use the h.264 format video that YouTube has available, because that video is generally very low quality. And I'm not merely being particular here: it looks quite bad on the TV. Thus, we need to transcode the video that we downloaded to h.264. I use ffmpeg for this.

ffmpeg -i tafs-amandakonx.* -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy amandaknox-tafs.mp4

This takes a while on my Thinkpad T460: about 1/4 the length of the video. This is the slowest step, but provides us a lesson in avoiding instant gratification. Do you actually want to watch this video, or are you just mindlessly clicking around YouTube, waiting for something to grab your attention?

Once I have my transcoded video, I copy it to a USB drive. I tried using an FTP server ftpii, but this was far slower than just copying the file to a USB and plugging it in to the Wii. From here, we can enjoy our video.

As a bonus step, we can also make VHS tapes of our downloaded video. Simply plug the TV into a VCR and record it as it plays!