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.