-Baby.
Hey, I just met you.
-Roku doesn't include an official YouTube channel.
In fact, it seems like everytime a third party channel that streams you to videos gets added, Roku pulls it.
Well, luckily, there is a work round for this.
Today, I'll show you how to use a setup called Twonky, which lets you beam YouTube videos from your phone to the Roku.
Let's get started.
First, you'll need to do some setup on your Roku.
So, to do that,
head to a browser on your phone or your computer and go to owner.roku.com/add.
Here, you'll be asked to add a private channel.
Private channels are basically beta channels that you won't see available for download here, but you can still add them on the website.
So, over here, go ahead and enter My Twonky and hit add channel.
And within a few minutes, you should see the Twonky channel show up on your Roku.
Now that we have that setup, we have a little bit more to do on your phone.
So, go ahead and install the Twonky Beam app for your iOS or Android device.
It's totally free.
Once you have it installed, you'll see a landing page full of video sources that you can use to beam videos to your Roku.
But today, all we really want is YouTube.
Now, the next thing we have to do is connect your phone to your Roku.
To do that, make sure your phone is connected to the same WiFi network as your Roku.
Once that's set
up, go ahead and swipe left from the home screen of the app and you'll see what I call your beam panel.
Here's where we'll connect your phone to the Roku.
Hit display device and then select Roku video player.
Now that everything is connected, you're ready to start beaming YouTube videos from your phone to your Roku.
Let's give it a try.
So, we'll go back to the home screen and click YouTube.
You'll basically be taken to YouTube's mobile site.
Here, find the video you wanna play.
Select it and within a few seconds you should see a beam button overlaid on the video.
Hit that Beam button and if you did everything correctly, you should see that video buffering on your Roku within a few seconds.
There it is.
Now, while the video is playing, you can swipe left again to view the Beam panel and you can pause or stop the video right from this panel.
Now, if you wanna get fancy, you have a couple other options.
The first one is video quality.
If your Roku is connected via Ethernet and you have a pretty good internet connection, you can Beam your videos in a higher quality.
To do that, go to the gear icon in the app, select Settings and change the bandwidth quality to high.
Also check out the cue option.
You can set up a whole list of videos that will play one after another within the app.
So, swipe left to get the Beam panel, and then click Beam cue off to turn it on.
Now, head to the videos you wanna cue up, hit the Beam button and it will be added to that list.
And when you're ready to switch back to on demand viewing, hit Beam cue on to disable it.
So, now that you know how to watch YouTube videos on your Roku, also check out the other channels that Twonky has to offer like Vimeo, TED or Funny or Die.
Granted some of them are already available on Roku, but you might find it easier to just navigate and Beam them from your phone.
As always, if you have any
questions along the way, hit me up on Twitter.
And check out howto.cnet.com for the written version of this tutorial.
For CNET, I'm Sharon Vaknin.
