Features

Screens

The app is designed around a few primary workflows:

• Today — the main inbox for fresh videos.
• Live — currently live and upcoming streams.
• Scheduled — videos saved into time-based buckets.
• Liked — videos you marked as liked.
• History — watched videos.
• Pulse — local viewing patterns for all profiles combined or a selected profile (hidden in the sidebar by default).
• Rejected — archived videos.
• Subscriptions — followed channels with recent activity.
• Settings — channels, tags, rules, playlists, appearance, feed, navigation, playback, privacy integrations, plugins, profiles, logs, child lock, authentication, and advanced options.

Full feature list

• Subscription inbox — all new videos from followed channels in one feed.
• Channel import — add channels manually, import OPML, or import subscriptions.csv from Google Takeout. See Importing Subscriptions.
• Live and upcoming streams — dedicated live view with automatic status refresh. Each profile can optionally hide live and Upcoming entries from the main feed while keeping them in the Live tab.
• Watch later buckets — schedule videos for Today, Tonight, Tomorrow, Tomorrow evening, or Weekend.
• Archive flow — reject videos, restore them later, and keep the main feed clean.
• Feed sorting and cleanup — sort the main inbox by YouTube publication time or when YT Zero first found the video, then bulk-preview and reject or mark matching items watched by date, channel, tag, and visibility.
• Watch history and progress — record watched videos and resume partially watched videos.
• Incognito mode — disable history, progress, and viewing-insight writes for the current browser tab; existing history can also be removed item by item.
• Pulse — compare actual playback time across profiles, channels, tags, days and hours; see daily trends, a weekday/hour heatmap, content mix, profile shares, most-watched videos, and time actually saved by automatic SponsorBlock skips. The view is kept under More by default and is unavailable to child profiles. All calculations stay on the YT Zero server.
• Liked videos — mark videos as liked and browse them from a dedicated view.
• Tags — tag videos and channels; channel tags are inherited by their videos.
• Automatic tag rules — apply tags by matching title or description text.
• Filter rules — automatically reject matching videos, or keep only matching videos for selected channels.
• User playlists — create local playlists, choose icons, add videos manually, and populate playlists with rules.
• Profiles — multiple isolated profiles on one install. See Profiles.
• Authentication — None, shared login, per-profile login, OIDC, or proxy headers, with password and passkey support. See Authentication.
• Child lock — protect household settings with a 6-digit PIN while leaving personal tags, filters, and playlists available by default. Children can add channels only during an unlocked settings session and with sufficient profile permissions. See Child Lock.
• Child profiles — daily watch-time limits, parent-approved extensions, subscribed-content-only mode, optional Shorts and live-stream blocking, permission-filtered settings, and hidden app-provided YouTube links. See Child Lock.
• Child activity panel — adult profiles can see what children are watching, check remaining time, open the video locally, stop watching immediately, and unlock a child profile.
• Channel pages — browse regular videos, Shorts, public playlists, channel metadata, and channel-specific tags.
• Video context and sharing — inspect creators and collaborators, copy or share a local/YouTube link, and capture frames with the local player or YT Zero Enhance.
• Public sharing — optional, default-off bearer links for individual videos, personal playlists, and followed YouTube playlists. Public links bypass normal sign-in and require careful proxy and logging configuration; read Public Sharing before enabling them.
• Theater view — distraction-light player layout for watching.
• Internationalization — English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Hungarian UI, with saved user preference.
• Player preferences — captions, player language, caption language, preferred quality, default playback speed, and Shorts visibility.
• List continuation — after a video ends, continue from the feed, history, liked videos, a playlist, or another compatible list that opened it; either play automatically or wait for confirmation and choose the list direction.
• Comments — an optional, default-off watch-page section loaded on demand through yt-dlp only after the viewer reaches it.
• Playback speed — set a default speed that is applied to every video on load (instead of resetting to 1× each time), with an optional per-channel override. Profiles can add up to 16 custom selector values from 0.1× to 4× under Settings → Playback, including values such as 2.3×. The per-channel override can be set from either the channel page or the speed control in the player, and both places stay in sync (changing the speed in the player saves it as that channel's default). The override wins over the global default; clearing it falls back to the global default. Local/download playback and YT Zero Enhance support custom values; the standard YouTube iframe may round a value it does not expose through its API. The setting is stored per profile and does not apply to the Shorts player.
• Custom display — rename the app, change grid density, show or hide top channels, and reorder or hide sidebar items.
• Shorts tab — dedicated Shorts view that shows only Shorts from channels you follow, filterable by tag. Watched Shorts are marked in the grid.
• Shorts player — a full-screen vertical player for browsing Shorts one at a time. Navigate with on-screen arrows, keyboard arrows, or swipe; Space pauses and resumes. The next and previous Shorts are preloaded for instant playback.
• SponsorBlock — optional integration with SponsorBlock to automatically skip sponsored segments, intros, outros, interaction reminders, and more. Configurable per category.
• DeArrow — optional integration with DeArrow that replaces clickbait titles and thumbnails on video cards with community-created alternatives. Titles and thumbnails can be enabled separately under Settings → Privacy, and both are off by default. When a replacement is available, hover or focus the card to reveal a control for switching between the DeArrow and original versions. Failed or unavailable replacements fall back to the original, and stored library metadata is never changed.
• Per-channel refresh schedules — adaptive refresh remains active, while predictable channels can receive additional day-and-time checks from their channel settings.
• YT-DLP Integration (plugin) — download videos to local files and play them in YT Zero's own player: scheduled downloads, previewable automation rules, playlist-wide actions, a priority queue, selectable sidecar metadata and subtitles, per-profile cookies, smart retention, and a dedicated Downloads tab. It can also direct-stream a progressive MP4 without creating a file, including fallback when YouTube embedding is disabled. Disabled by default. See YT-DLP Integration.
• TubeArchivist Integration (plugin) — import an existing TubeArchivist catalog into the normal feed, identify locally available archive media on video cards, deduplicate it by YouTube ID, play protected media through YT Zero's local player, show archived comments and subtitles, and synchronize watched state in both directions with durable retries. Disabled by default and intentionally has no separate library page. See TubeArchivist Integration.
• Fullscreen in landscape (mobile) — optional setting under Settings → Playback: rotating the phone to landscape on the watch page enters fullscreen automatically. Not available in Safari on iOS or in an iPhone PWA (Apple doesn't let pages enter fullscreen); there it works only for downloaded videos via the native player.
• Temporary videos — open videos from YouTube search even when they are not from followed channels, then review or clear them later.
• Notifications — receive in-app update and download-failure notices with direct links to the affected destination.
• Application logs — inspect live backend logs from the settings UI and pause or resume automatic scrolling.
• Changelog and update checks — inspect bundled and newer release notes, check GitHub for updates manually, or choose an automatic check interval.
• Image cache — local thumbnail and image cache for faster repeat loads.