bookmarking videos for playback on TV

January 11, 2018 1:34 PM

When browsing RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook on my phone or computer, I often find videos I want to watch later on my TV. Right now I usually add the website to safari's 'reading list.' Then when I'm at home and am looking for a video to watch, I'll scroll through this list and fight with the necessary apps to send the video to the TV. I find the browse/playback part of this process fairly frustrating and am looking for suggestions on how to improve the experience.

Mostly these videos are conference presentations from YouTube, but sometimes vimeo or other sites.
The browse problems are not a huge deal, but it often takes a few clicks and fighting with zoom/orientation to actually read the video title/description. Maybe this is because the SE has less screen real estate than other devices, not sure.

I feel like AirPlay is supposed to be the solution to this, but it falls short for me in a few ways:

• I can't use the AppleTV remote to play/pause or skip around <- This is my biggest problem
• Depending on the site/app, the airplay stream stops when the phone locks. <- I think this is mobile safari's fault, but I really don't want an app for each video service
• My phone gets quite hot and kills the battery (due to the stream forwarding? <- This is minor, but I really don't understand why AirPlay doesn't just send the URL and be done with it.

I have tried the youtube watchlist via firefox on my fireTV, but I can't figure out how to delete the video from the list after watching and it obviously only supports youtube.

Am I missing something obvious? If I bought a new AppleTV or other device would my problems go away? Is there an android-ish streaming method I could use on my FireTV that iOS supports?

Devices I own that I would like to use to bookmark videos:

• iPhone SE
• Windows PC(s)
• MacBook

Devices connected to my Tv:

• Apple TV 2nd Gen
• FireTV
• Original Chromecast I haven't used in a while but could dig out of a drawer

I am fairly anti-app and would prefer a browser or native solution, but I am open to upgrading my TV-connected devices (possibly even running a cheap linux computer?)
Are there better ways to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

posted by stobor to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I use Zinc for this. It doesn't check all your boxes, but I think it gets a bunch of them and it's worked well for me.
posted by daisy55 at 1:53 PM on January 11, 2018

From the computer I would think the Chromecast is the way to go. The functionality for connecting is directly built into the Chrome browser now, so it works noticeably better than when I first got one and it was based on a browser plugin or app or whatever.
posted by XMLicious at 1:56 PM on January 11, 2018

(But for example with a Youtube playlist you would still want to click on the Chromecast button that appears on the Youtube or Vimeo video itself, so that it just sends the URL like you want rather than video of the web page or your desktop.)
posted by XMLicious at 2:01 PM on January 11, 2018

I use Plex for this and have been happy with it. Here's instructions for installing it on your Apple TV. Plex has a bookmarklet that I drug to my favorites bar in Safari, for flagging things to watch later.
posted by culfinglin at 3:02 PM on January 11, 2018