I've already been paying for YouTube Premium for many years to get rid of advertisement, and I've been using SponsorBlock for a year or so on my laptop to skip the inline ads, but because most of my watching of YouTube happens on the TV I always had to use the remote to skip it. It helps to see the "most rewind" area so you can fast forward to it, but it's still very cumbersome.

Now a couple of days someone mentioned SmartTube on Lemmy and I installed it on my Chromecast with Google TV OS and oh boy is this software great! I did it to get SponsorBlock, but that is by far not the only feature I love about it.

  • flexible time hiding the UI of a video (have it to 1 sec now)
  • not showing UI when pausing
  • way faster scrolling
  • instant loading
  • way faster account switching
  • instant voice search

But there is one feature missing, changing the search language. We speak combined 7 languages at home and it's impossible to search anything other than in English which is really annoying.

Anyway, check it out if you can on your TV.

  • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    I fuckin love how it auto skips the sponsored bullshit. I have no idea how it knows even when it's seamlessly part of a video but it does. It's witchcraft and I love it!

      • SARGEx117@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It's insane to me that I can click on a video that was posted by a creator with under 10k subscribers, less than 15 minutes ago, and it already has dozens of votes for submitted segments.

        And some videos, people go waaaaay out for segments, little 2 second skips for subscribe reminders, while blocks rendered down into 5 types of segments so depending on your settings, you might get some of it, or you might get just the meat of the content with no fluff or filler.

        I LOVE the "interaction" skip on some content creators, because they like to address the audience unnecessarily trying to drive comment interaction up. I totally get why they do that, and I respect their decision, but I also have no intention of commenting on 90% of videos, so asking "what do YOU think? Head down to the comments and…" will get nothing from me, but might from someone else. And now I can skip those.

        Re/vanced and now this have been the best things about YouTube since like 2007.

      • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.netOP
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        1 year ago

        Oh those are interesting stats, especially the 338k Firefox vs 1M Chrome users, so basically 25% of SponsorBlock users are Firefox users, while Firefox has 3% market share.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Sponsorblock is a browser add on and it’s crowdsourced, also try DeArrow for crowdsourced titles and thumbnails

    • bob_lemon@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I kind of need a whitelist of channels where I want to see the ads, like Jay Foreman.

      • prole@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Sponsor Block (the Firefox extension) gives you a ton of customizability. You don't have to have it auto skip, you can make it so a tiny bubble pops up asking if you want to skip or not. Or you can even just have it highlight it on the seek bar and nothing else.