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.
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.