Re-Engineering YouTube for the Living Room: Bringing "Chrobalt" to RDK
Collabora and Google built the first RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform, re-architecting YouTube's Cobalt web engine on Chromium for smart TVs.
Collabora spent over a year with Google's YouTube Cobalt and Partner Engineering teams porting Chrobalt — Cobalt re-architected on top of Chromium, starting with 26.eap and now 27.lts tracking Chromium 138+ — to an RDK platform on Amlogic chipsets. The work included modernizing Starboard and Yocto toolchains, integrating Chromium unit tests and the Starboard NPLB conformance suite, and validating the platform against YouTube Test Suite (YTS) requirements for 4K/UHD playback, DRM, and low-latency input. Collabora also co-authored a Rust reference implementation of the Device Automation Bus (DAB) adapter and upstreamed fixes to the Cobalt/Starboard codebase. The platform was presented as a validated, production-ready path at the YouTube Device Partner Summit and BlinkOn-21.