Kids love YouTube. Maybe a little too much. Tired of the endless “five more minutes” battles?
TubeTimeout is a light-weight parental controls app able to keep track of and block YouTube usage on your home network.
Group Wi-Fi devices your way — kids’ tablets, the TV, or the whole house — and give each group its own YouTube time limit.
No apps. No accounts. No subscriptions. Just set the limits and relax.
- Counts YouTube usage and blocks traffic using nftables
- Daily or weekly time limits can be applied to any group of devices
- Works for all devices on your home network
- Simple web UI to configure settings
- No third-party libraries, cloud services or apps required
TubeTimeout runs on low spec hardware like a RaspberryPi Zero2w or Orange Pi Zero3 and works best when there is a wired ethernet connection.
- Disable IPv6 on your home network
- Disable DHCP on your router and let the TubeTimeout device take over (it uses dnsmasq)
TubeTimeout runs a DHCP server. It was the simplest way to ensure all devices on the network send their traffic to a place that can be counted and blocked. It uses nftables to count and block traffic based on IP addresses; it doesn't currently use DNS based blocking like PiHole or AdGuard.
The idea is to turn off DHCP on your main router and let TubeTimeout handle it. It forwards packets to the router after counting traffic. The extra delay is just a few milliseconds, which is perfectly fine for streaming and kids’ games. Of course, it’s probably not the best for FPS multiplayer games.
It's worth saying that there’s not much that can stop people from finding workarounds if they’re clever, but it’s fantastic for young children and those who aren’t tech-savvy!
If you’re interested in learning more, there are a couple of blogs on the TubeTimeout website (start here) to help with the setup and give you a deep dive into how it was built.
The following is a rough list of commands required to install TubeTimeout on a vanilla OrangePi Zero3 running Armbian o/s.
This has been tested on Armbian 25.5.1 Noble, but should work well with Raspbian o/s on other RaspberryPi devices as well.
Follow the next steps below to learn more about how to configure TubeTimeout.
# Run everything as root
sudo su -
# Install packages
apt install -y nftables libnetfilter-queue1 libnetfilter-queue-dev net-tools dnsmasq git
# Install Golang (assumes zsh is your default shell)
wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.23.1.linux-arm64.tar.gz
tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.23.1.linux-arm64.tar.gz
rm go1.23.1.linux-arm64.tar.gz
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:.' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
# Clone the repo and prevent file ownership warnings
cd /root
git clone [email protected]:relloyd/tubetimeout.git
git config --global --add safe.directory /root/tubetimeout
# Set kernel parameters to enable ip forwarding and more
cat <<EOF > /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf
net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog=4096
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout=10
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=60
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl=10
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes=5
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv4.tcp_retries2=5
net.core.rmem_max=8388608
net.core.wmem_max=8388608
net.ipv4.udp_rmem_min=8192
net.ipv4.udp_wmem_min=8192
net.core.netdev_max_backlog=5000
EOF
# Configure journal config to limit disk space usage
mkdir -p /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d
cat <<EOF > /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/custom.conf
[Journal]
Storage=persistent
SystemMaxUse=50M
SystemKeepFree=100M
SystemMaxFileSize=10M
MaxRetentionSec=1month
EOF
# Disable the default resolver as we set this in Go code per network device using nmcli
# This symlink is in place by default: /etc/resolv.conf -> /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf
# We replace it below, but the tubetimeout generated dnsmasq.conf will tell it to use no-resolv anyway
systemctl disable --now systemd-resolved
rm /etc/resolv.conf
echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" > /etc/resolv.conf
# Ensure dnsmasq is stopped before running "make install" so tests can pass
systemctl stop dnsmasq.service
# Install TubeTimeout
make install
make daemon
# Set the red status light on OrangePiZero3
echo "stmmac-0:01:1Gbps" | tee /sys/class/leds/red:status/trigger
echo "none" | tee /sys/class/leds/red:status/trigger
echo 1 | tee /sys/class/leds/red:status/brightness
# Configure the hostname and reboot to pick up the new kernel parameters etc
hostnamectl hostname tubetimeout
reboot
Learn how to use the UI and configure TubeTimeout by reading documentation here:
https://www.tubetimeout.com/post/how-to-set-up-tubetimeout
After your device reboots, load the UI here:
- Blocking more streaming services, e.g. TikTok, Meta services like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp
- Arbitrary lists of URLs to count & block traffic for
- DHCP issuing the main router as the default gateway to devices that want lower latency
- IPv6 support
- Blocking new/unknown network devices by default (currently it blocks based on a deny list rather than using an explicit allow list)
I'd welcome any PRs and suggestions you may have. Good luck and best wishes,
Richard