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BrainrotGuard
BrainRotGuard puts a parent between YouTube's recommendation engine and your kid: children search freely, but nothing plays until you tap Approve in Telegram. The request that lands on your phone carries the thumbnail, title, channel, and duration, and one tap either starts the video on the child's tablet instantly or denies it for good. Channels you trust can be allowlisted as educational or entertainment so their new uploads arrive pre-approved, while blocked channels and title word filters stop repeat offenders automatically. Each child gets a profile with its own PIN, watch history, and time budgets, and educational and entertainment content can draw from separate daily limits. Scheduled windows keep the app closed during school hours or after bedtime, with different rules per weekday and bonus minutes grantable for today only. Approved videos stay in a library the child can rewatch without asking again, a dedicated Shorts row can be shown or switched off entirely, and a search-off mode limits younger kids to channels and videos you already approved. You see all of it from the parent side: pending queues, search history, and an activity log of what was watched and for how long. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.
Benefits
- Approval before anything plays
- Every video request arrives in Telegram with thumbnail, title, channel, and duration; nothing reaches the child's screen until a parent taps Approve, and approved videos start playing automatically.
- No algorithm, no autoplay
- The player has no recommendation sidebar, no up-next queue, and no ads; videos play through embeds and simply stop, so sessions end instead of spiraling into suggested content.
- Trusted channels run themselves
- Allowlisting a channel as educational or entertainment auto-approves its future uploads into the right time budget, while blocklists and title word filters deny unwanted content without asking.
- Time budgets per child
- Separate profiles carry their own PINs, daily limits for educational versus entertainment viewing, scheduled access windows per weekday, and bonus minutes a parent can grant for today only.
Features
- Telegram approval bot
- Requests, pending queues, channel management, time setup wizards, and statistics are handled through Telegram inline buttons and commands such as /setup, /pending, /channel, and /time add.
- yt-dlp powered search
- Video search and metadata come from yt-dlp, so no YouTube API key or Google account is required; playback uses standard YouTube embeds on the child's device.
- Multi-child profiles
- Each child has a separate PIN, watch history, search history, time budgets, and an optional search-off mode that restricts them to allowlisted channels and pre-approved videos.
- Shorts under control
- YouTube Shorts appear in a dedicated row with portrait thumbnails and a 9:16 player, and parents can hide Shorts across the whole app with one toggle.
- Single SQLite database
- All approvals, profiles, and activity live in one SQLite file inside a non-root Docker container; prebuilt images cover amd64 and arm64, with an Unraid template available.