YouTube has taken down a video from tech creator Jeff Geerling that demonstrated how to use LibreELEC, a lightweight operating system for turning devices into media centers, on a Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K video playback. The video, titled "I replaced my Apple TV—with a Raspberry Pi", originally published in May 2024, was removed in June 2025 under YouTube's "Harmful or dangerous content" policy. According to the violation notice, YouTube claimed the video showed "how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content, software, subscription services, or games that usually require payment."
Geerling strongly refuted YouTube's claims. He stated clearly, "I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools that are popularly used to circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content."
He also emphasized that his own Network Attached Storage, or NAS, contains only legally acquired content.
This isn't Geerling's first run-in with YouTube over self-hosted media tools. Last October, his tutorial titled "Better than Disney+: Jellyfin on my NAS" was hit with a similar strike for showing how to set up Jellyfin, an open source media server for organizing and streaming personal media. That strike was quickly overturned after an appeal. But this time, YouTube rejected his appeal, even though the LibreELEC video had been live for over a year, had racked up over half a million views, and contained no promotion of anything illegal.
This whole thing feels a lot like what happened with youtube-dl. It's a simple command-line tool for downloading videos, used by tons of people for perfectly legal reasons like saving public domain content or backing up their own uploads. But that didn't stop the RIAA from hitting it with a DMCA takedown on GitHub, calling it a piracy tool.
The community pushed back hard, and eventually it was brought back, thanks in part to support from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation who pointed out that not everything that can be misused is automatically bad. Side note, the youtube-dl project appears to be unmaintained (the last release was in 2021), if you're looking for an alternative, consider its very popular fork, yt-dlp.
After the appeal was rejected, YouTube required Geerling to complete "policy training" to avoid a more serious, permanent strike on his channel. He eventually gave in and took the training. Anyways, if you're interested, he has uploaded the removed LibreELEC video to Internet Archive for anyone to watch.
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