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.
- Chrobalt merges Cobalt with Chromium, adding modern web features and rapid upstream security updates.
- First RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform targets Amlogic chipsets used by TV makers like Samsung and LG.
- Platform validated against YouTube Test Suite for 4K/UHD playback, DRM handling, and low-latency input.
- Collabora co-authored the Rust DAB adapter and upstreamed fixes to Cobalt/Starboard.
From the original article
4 min read at collabora.com
tl,dr: How Collabora partnered with the YouTube Cobalt and Device Partner Engineering teams to deliver the first RDK-based reference platform for their next-generation living room web engine . Switch on your Smart TV, open YouTube, and navigate to Settings → App Version , you might spot a version text like 25. lts .
By losgehts · collabora.com
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