SMTube for little kids - suggestions?

[enigma9o7]

Hello smtube users,

I have a couple old pc's (i.e. P4) running lightweight 32-bit ubuntu 18.04 based distro for my 5-year old kids. The mainly use them for games (linux/snes/gba) but also watch videos sometimes, and for the past couple years that was thru minitube. However the old version I was using quit working, and the new version that does work won't work on either of my kids PCs, and I've exhausted my options trying to make that work. (One of them segfaults after search screen, the other has audio but no video.).

So in attempt to find a working alternative, I set up smtube for them.

The biggest issue is it doesn't save search history. Minitube shows the last 10 or so searches on its initial screen, which allowed my kids to just click something easily I'd typed for them before (i.e. abc songs, phonics, unicorn coloring, etc). Whereas SMTube starts very slowly (on my hardware) and then up a screen full of "popular" videos. I'd rather it didn't. I did determine I can avoid that by putting an initial search on the command line, but I'd prefer a start screen that didn't load anything at all by default. And my kids are starting to learn to write barely, so they may soon start typing in their own search terms, so I'd like to enable safe search etc by default.

I spent quite a bit of time playing with smplayer and vlc command lines. By using things like on-top and one-instance play-then-exit and a few other switches, I at least made it so if they click another video while its playing, it switches, and when its done, it exits media player. Didn't seem like I could make it automatically play the next video (like minitube does).

But my bigest annoyance was video player window size. Minitube was convenient as it played everything in its own window. With SMtube, I can't seem to get it to behave the way I want, and I've played with various size and position settings. I have 1280x1024 screen resolution (CRT monitors) and smtube set to prefer 720p. When something is actually 720p, it should be full width, and that works ok. But for example when a video is like 480x360 I'd prefer to have it doubled in size with right side of window on right side of screen. Basically everything that's widescreen scaled to fit 1280 width and positioned on bottom of desktop, and if not widescreen, scaled to use most of the screen but pegged to the bottom right (so search results still visible on left). I'm not sure how to accomplish what I want via command line without knowing the resolution in advance. I can only find settings that make me happy for a particular video resolution, but not something that does what I want regardless of video's resolution. But anyways it's better than non functional, and I guess it'll teach my kids learn to resize and move windows.