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Comment by whatsthatabout | Hacker News Reader

That’s true for ads from youtube (I have yt premium myself) but not for ads directly in the video. The yt app from the homebrew store has sponsorblock[1] integrated which can skip these too.

[1] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

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WOW, SponsorBlock is something I didn't know I needed so bad! Thanks a lot for sharing. (I also pay for yt premium btw)

FUN FACT: yt-dlp (the new youtube dl cmd line app) also has sponserblock integration so it can automatically download files and strip the ads from the video file if you specify the "--sponsorblock-remove all" argument. There are other arguments you can pass to fine tune this, check the docs.

I’d much rather have the full video file and instead have it be possible to skip at the point of playback. I believe this is possible too: yt-dlp can mark the sponsored sections as a separate chapter in the video file.

If you are talking about in video sponsorship segments, how does sponsorblock know when they start or end? Are creators required to tag their sponsorship segments with timestamps somewhere?

The data is crowd sourced from other sponsorblock users.

It's even gamified a little bit; the add-on tracks how much time your submissions have saved other people (so if you block out 30 second sponsor spot, and 10 users skip that spot, you get credited with 300 seconds of time save), and there is a leaderboard. Popular YouTubers like Linus tech tips will have their sponsor spots identified and submitted within a couple of minutes of uploading because the high view count is worth a ton of time save.

Something else a lot of people don't know is that it can be configured to skip things that are not simply sponsor spots, stuff like filler, intro and and cards, begging for subscriptions, and so forth. That add-on is the single greatest quality of life improvement YouTube has ever seen.

> it can be configured to skip things that are not simply sponsor spots, stuff like filler, intro and and cards, begging for subscriptions, and so forth

Amazing! I didn't know that. Now I'm starting to wonder why I ever tolerated this noise in the first place...

Wow! Can I still cast YouTube videos from my phone to TV? I understand that it is not a screencasting, phone app just sends video id and control signals.

Yes casting still works! Just rooted my tv, my wife thinks I'm a genius XD

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