[Fire TV Themes and Apps] Protocol Zero:
Hey everyone, first of all I want to thank everyone for all the hard work provided for this! It really is a shame that YouTube TV can't just have an official release, especially since it DOES actually work, just a few minor tweaks and it would be flawless! I've been following guides and things for days trying to get this to work, and I have successfully got it installed and it plays! Well, I've only tested live TV, I haven't tried anything that's been recorded yet. There is one issue that I will explain later on. First, I'll explain the trials I took.

I was fairly convinced in the beginning that I would need a working google play store in order to get this app, thinking if I can just get a play store that works, I can just install it from there! My entire first day of trying to fix this was trying to install google. I never succeeded. One of the guides I followed mentioned if I can install all the framework for google and then install Gmail so I could add a google account to the Firestick, then I would be set! I did do that, and it never worked. I found THIS GUIDE that had a link for a YouTube TV apk, that I tried, which did let me actually login, and I was able to see the live TV guide and my recordings, but nothing would play. I'm going to test back with that and play with it to see if maybe it's a settings issue later. Before I did anything else, I uninstalled all of the previous YouTube TV apks I installed as well as all the Google apks.

Then what I did was went to see if maybe an older version of the YouTube TV APK existed, since I'm using the 2nd gen FireStick, maybe I needed an older version? That's when I think I discovered the issue that many of us ran into. When I was searching APKMirror originally, I just installed the newest version of YouTube TV and didn't look that close, then when I went looking for an older version, I saw one specific version that was labeled (Android TV) and I remembered seeing that in some of the guides I read. So I grabbed YouTube TV - Watch & Record Live TV (Android TV) 1.05.05 (arm-v7a) and installed it. Prior to this I did install the The Crosswalk Project runtime (XWalk) that was found in the guide that I linked to in the previous paragraph. I have no idea if that app had any effect on the outcome, but it was installed first.

After installing the Android TV version of the YouTube TV app, I opened it, got the option of being an existing member, it gave me a code to use on the YouTube TV website, and I was all signed in! I could see the TV listings and it looked good! Then I went to play a show and I was staring at a black screen. Then I remembered everyone saying that it would only work in 480p mode, so I pressed down and over to the right until I was on the three dots, opened that menu and went to quality and changed it to 480p, and the show was playing! I nearly jumped for joy at this point! Then I continued to experiment, and I realized that after I set it to 480p and it played, I could change it back to 1080p and it worked! However, the video would never open initially if it were set to anything other than 480p. Also, some channels also wouldn't play at first, I would have to go to another channel and then back to the one I wanted. But, I was able to watch every channel I tried! All the menu buttons worked (add to library, captioning, stats for nerds, etc). The only real annoyance was I would have to manually change the quality down to 480p, let it load, and then move it back up to 1080p. That annoyance pretty much guarantees my wife will never try to open this app, so if anyone knows a way around it, or even a reason why this happens, I would very much appreciate it!

I hope this helps someone, and I really do hope we can find a solution for this soon!