I self-host Piped and Invidious in containers with networking plumbed to glueton[1] on a VPN.
This way all traffic going to youtube from piped/invidious comes from the VPN, and can easily switch regions/providers if there’s service degradation. Also mixes traffic with other VPN users to lower fingerprinting.
This patterns works well with almost any self-hosted service.
I’ve had good luck with iSponsorBlockTV [1] for skipping/muting ads on our LG TV Youtube app and has Samsung Tizen on their supported list.
For my iPhone I do a combination of self-hosted Piped [2] exposed through Tailscale [3] with Yattee [4]. Both Piped and Yattee work with Sponsorblock and can be customized to see 0 ads.
Tailscale is useful since your phone/ipad/piped are on the same Tailnet regardless of location and you can stream from anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
You can also swap out components; eg Invidious instead of Piped or your own Wireguard setup instead of Tailscale.
Restic + rclone [1] is a good combination. Supports encryption, versioning, dedupe, snapshots etc. When I looked into offsite backups a couple years ago I was originally focused on the cost for storage but then realized data transfer costs can add up too.
After doing evals on S3, Wasabi, Backblaze and Hetzner with Restic I ended up going with Google Drive. Flat annual price and no data transfer fees. Since Restic does all encryption locally I’m not worried about what the Big G can see.