iSponsorBlockTV v2: SponsorBlock for TVs and game consoles | Hacker News Reader

iSponsorBlockTV v2: SponsorBlock for TVs and game consoles

github.com

273 pointsdmunozv04115 comments

Sponsorblock has been a Godsend for me; it's something you don't really think about but adds up. The sponsored segments are not even really the biggest advantage, it also skips intros and outros and interaction reminders, which are huge.

I am convinced that being really aggressive about blocking advertisements helps with my ADHD and helps me focus better. I don't have science to back that up, just my anecdotal self-reported experience -- but I see improvements every time I get a little bit more purposeful about blocking ads (and not just ads but intros, boot screens, social reminders, suggested articles, etc -- basically interruptions). And when I see ads now that I'm no longer desensitized to them, they stick out so much and they're so hard to ignore. Our brains are good at filtering things out, but I do wonder if there's a focus cost in addition to a time cost. My mood improves when my house is clean and organized; my mood also improves when my media consumption is organized and de-cluttered.

> interaction reminders

I’ve been wondering about these… do people really need to be reminded to “subscribe like comment down below” in every single video?

Don’t people know the creator wants you to do it and only do it if they feel like anyway?

What’s the point of everyone saying it in every single video?

It’s just aggravating to me, but I wonder why they keep saying it?

yeh they do. All the analytics show up right when it's mentioned people do it.

When you see stats like this it is hard to not just go full doomer and think most people are sheep

or they just forgot about it , like i usually do. I still never remember to "like" videos because i didn' grow up on social media.

Long intros are the worst. You had a nice click bait title and thumbnail fucking get to the content instead of telling me how busy you have been and how you feel/sound sick or entire history of everything and everyone even remotely related to the topic if the video.

Just give me the meat and give it to me raw

Look at the Clickbait Remover extension for youtube, it replaces the thumbnails with true thumbs crested from the video

DeArrow is my favorite tool to remove clickbait thumbnails and titles: https://dearrow.ajay.app/

You can skip past all that just by skipping the gaping mouth soyjak thumbnails.

It's like their primary goal is to dump their opinion-drama on their seemingly captive audience, and any actual 'content' is far secondary to first-order-thinking-limited outrage.

Fuck all of them, and fuck the average human's susceptibility to being brain-hacked like that.

(Yes, there's plenty of good content and presenters out there, but there's about 1000x more dressed-up trash that also seem to have an unexplainable gazillion-and-one appropriately named "followers").

I use sponsor block on youtube too (I have youtube premium but that does not remove these sponsor blocks automatically) and the only videos I'm kinda sad not to see the sponsor blocks are videos by "Internet Historian".

He does it funny enough not to be annoying. Worst example on the other hand is Linus Tech Tips in my opinion

Most SponsorBlock clients offer a way to whitelist certain channels so they aren’t skipped (iSponsorBlockTV does it), so that’s a good option if you like their sponsor segments

Youtube recently emailed me to say that they are cancelling the Youtube Premium Lite plan (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649777) that I've been on for 3 years.

This looks interesting.

This is to skip in-video sponsorships/ads (based on community tagging them as such), not YouTube ads.

It actually works for both. It will skip/mute YouTube ads. Only ads that have the ‘skip’ button will be skipped

Which is pretty much none these days.

I’ve found that having ads muting is much less obstructive. It’s not ideal but it improves it a bit

I wonder if they can overlay a GIF of a cat on top of the video when the ad is playing...

Yea, they recently doubled the price of their ad-free version so back we go to ublock and sponsor block.

That’s a shame, I was waiting for this plan to be available in my country to get it.

Sponsorblock is one of the best things I have ever used in the last 5 years.

"You've saved people from 1,927 segments ( 16h 56.3 minutes of their lives )

You've skipped 5,500 segments ( 1d 9h 19.3 minutes )"

Absolutely ridiculous how much filler youtube is filled with to hit the 10 minute marks! I hope they never go down, it's a great free service.

On mobile phones we use vanced, on my nvidia shields we use smarttubenext. Both integrate with sponsorblock automatically.

shields smarttube beta is one of the best things ever https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

It's so good I sold my rokus and bought two shields just to use that software.

Worth noting that this works on any Android/Google TV box and Fire sticks, not just the Shield.

I highly recommend the newest Walmart 4K ONN streaming box (official Google TV), which is an absolute steal at <$20.

I didn’t know about this, just installed and it works amazing. I have premium but I hate the sponsor segments in the videos. If Google breaks this app, I’ll try out the iSponsorBlockTV but this is a better fit for my situation now.

Recommend this one too. I normally use an AppleTV for all my TV needs, but I bought a FireTV stick just to install this app and be able to watch YouTube without ads and sponsored content.

You can sideload a YouTube client with integrated sponsorblock on your AppleTV. But this will require apple developer account ($99 per year). Not q perfect solution and cost money but just wanted to say that is an option for people inside Apple ecosystem.

shield costs about $150 iirc

You prompted me to go through the FreeTube settings. SponsorBlock is just right there. I didn't even think to look for it. Amazing! Thanks.

I wonder how many of the open source clients have it built in.

You should use ReVanced, Vanced is a dead project. Luckily, ReVanced also has SponsorBlock support.

The database is available for download from several mirrors [1] [2].

[1]: https://sponsor.ajay.app/database

[2]: https://github.com/mchangrh/sb-mirror

On the other hand, youtube is trying hard to stop adblock use in general on browsers.. down to the level of having to update ublock lists hourly, get popup mssages, and playlists stopping playback after three videos.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/173jmog/youtu...

After disabling my adblock for YT I noticed the video player has gotten much worse. I always saw preroll ads still but now all of them are completely jarring. My previous player seemed to play them inline whereas now they load separately, jump abruptly, much more annoying.

i can almost nod my head in acceptance for a :30 ad before a new piece of content. at :45, i'm starting to get annoyed. at :60, i'm wondering if this is really worth it. then, youtube steps up to the plate, points to the fences, and serves up a 2minute30second (i've seen longer) short film on some clearly fake as fuck scam type of 4am paid programming type of crap. on top of serving some mind bendingly annoying long ad break, they don't even attempt to prevent serving clearly malicious ads. if you're going to be heartless and force ads, don't be soulless and at least vet the ads from obvious scams.

I left a playlist on while working, so an anonymous account. A full on hour self-help seminar was playing as an ad. if you don't skip the ads you get to some weird places.

Its weird too because the ad-player doesn't like you scrub the timeline or go forward-back. So even if it was an interesting ad you can't go back or interact at all. Its so similar to a late-night infomercial and unlike a YT video its uncanny.

Yeh there's no way humans are watching those, almost technically so. Whoever is buying the ad time is being scammed hard or money laundering somehow.

There's a channel I like to watch "Mini Air Crash Investigation" who does 5-15 minute long summaries of airplane crashes and the results of the ensuing investigations.

I once got an ad on one of their videos for a 45 minute long video of an air crash investigation from a copycat channel narrated by someone with a very similar voice. I got about 10 minutes in before thinking "wow, this is a pretty weak episode from this channel" before noticing what was going on.

(I don't mean to imply all air crash investigation style channels are copying this one. But that video was a straight copy of their style, narrative order, and even voice and speaking style).

Like Already__Taken says, if you go a while without skipping ads, youtube seems to intentionally show you longer and longer ads.

I have premium now, and while I enjoy it, I really feel like I got bullied into subscribing. If all the ads breaks were 60 seconds total or less I would have been fine staying a free user. But they punish me for not diligently having my finger ready to press "skip".

Vinegar for iOS and macOS uses the native player. Along with adblocking I rarely see the FOPRA (flash of pre-roll ads). Whenever I use a native app (FireTV, Apple TV) I’m annoyed by the now ≥10s unskippable ads.

I'm a YouTube (Red? Premium?) subscription so I don't see ads, but I'm very pleased to see SponsorBlock-like services spreading. Would love to see it for podcasts.

This can block the in video ads you do see with YT Premium.

Wait what? Do you still see ads even if you pay?

They are talking about sponsored content that the content creator records and shows in-video.

I would pay creators to not see that bullshit.

I don't care about NordVPN, Brilliant, SkillShare, or any other trash. I'm entirely less likely to use services that annoy me with their advertising.

Maybe you are. but decades of research indicate that people will choose familiarity and annoyance over ignorance of a product.

Not many creator's are on there, but this is the whole idea of Nebula: https://nebula.tv

I'd say there are a lot of creators, depending on the content type. As long as you're not looking for travel vloggers or unboxing/review videos or "lifestyle" vloggers there's plenty. Pretty much all science/history/urbanism/aviation YouTubers I follow are on Nebula as well.

Issue is that the UX isn't great (e.g. there are no playlists nor queues, and downloads don't work as well as they do on YouTube).

I agree, most of my YouTube creator's are there. I'm basically missing only Tom Scott, Kurzgesagt and Technology Connections.

UX is pretty meh (although the "Nebula Enhancer" browser plugin at least fixes the missing queue), but that doesn't work in the app obviously

Would you (and other people like you) be able to pay enough to match $2000 per video? And this is for a channel with "only" 260k subscribers

https://youtu.be/40Q7usuG2Cw?si=gfUS6TzIgNImTORX

On my phone so I can't easily timestamp but showing monetary amounts begins at 6:50

Brilliant, $4500 for 3 videos. Blinkist, $2000 for one video. VPN, specific brand not named, $5800 for a 90 second ad read. Raid Shadow Legends, $2000-6000 depending on if he's willing to dedicate time in his video to just playing the game on camera. Skillshare $2000 for a 90 second ad read.

The most interesting part to me was these are often not directly offered by these companies. They are from advertising partners who have a referral program with the primary company. So he would often get multiple emails to advertise the same product from different senders and offering different amounts of money.

This video has been viewed 134,000 times. At $2000 per video, that would be a cost of 1.5 cents per-view, and that's assuming no one else after this point would pay for the video. Inline sponsorships are probably the best form of advertising out there in terms of creator payout, but the reality is that even at its best, advertising for creators pays so low that it is really feasible for you to just sponsor the creators you're following for even just a buck a month and you'll probably be more valuable to them as a contributor than any of the people who are leaving ads enabled.

Especially if they're small creators. There really is a threshold in advertising where a lot of indie creators are not going to be offered this kind of money.

I don't blame creators for doing what they need to do to make money, the state of advertising is not their fault. But as an ecosystem of users and developers and as an industry, we can make a choice about whether a system that encourages influencers to lie about product recommendations and directly influences their content and the topics they can talk about is more or less exploitative and regressive than asking people to give money to creators directly.

Advertising is often phrased as an alternative to regressive taxes on content -- it allows us to give content to people who couldn't pay otherwise. But advertising is itself a regressive tax; advertisers would not be paying any money for advertising if it didn't change purchaser behavior. And for the social cost of that regressive tax, content creators get very little payout in return. $2000-6000 for a video sounds good only because we're thinking about it in comparison to Youtube payout. But it's not very much money for a video that likely required multiple workers and several weeks to a month to produce.

Overcast (iOS) supposedly can block ads and skip intros/outros. I haven’t tried using those features though.

It also blocks some audience-measuring redirects.

>Overcast (iOS) supposedly can block ads and skip intros/outros

Overcast intro and outro skip is a thing (that I use for most podcasts), but I've never seen anything like an ad-skipping feature. I listen to the developer's podcast (Accidental Tech Podcast) and he mentioned that ad detection and skipping is something that he's looked into and considering, but as far as I know it's not an overcast feature today.

He could implement it for ATP at least :P

I mean, technically he has: https://atp.fm/join

Paying $100 a year for a freaking podcast seems ridiculous to me, especially when there is no special cause behind it and the hosts are already rich af. But of course they are free to charge whatever they want.

I have an overcast next chapter action triggered by a Siri shortcut called “skip ad” — so I can just say “Siri, Skip Ad”. It works only if the podcast pervasively chapterizes of course, but thankfully most of mine do.

I don’t think it can skip automatically. I’m an Overcast user, and haven’t heard of this - and can’t find the feature now that I look.

It does have configurable “skip forward” and “skip backward” _times_, and will skip to and resume from between words instead of inside words - so it’s easier to manually skip than in some other apps - but I don’t think there’s anything automatic.

[Edit: Oh! It can skip a configurable amount of time from the start and end of playback of any podcast! It’s still manual though.]

I used Audacity to excerpt a clip from a podcast the other day and the ads were obvious just from the shape of the waveform. The ad section waveforms were half the height of the rest of the podcast. I don't know how representative that one podcast is.

For some reason I feel a lot worse about the idea of automatically skipping sponsor sections of YouTube videos than I do about blocking web ads.

Note that you can configure Sponsorblock not to skip sponsored segments but to still skip intros/outros and subscription/interaction reminders.

Adblocking is definitely the thing it's advertised on, but sponsored segments are only one labeled category. For longer lets-plays it's great to have the equivalent of Netflix's "skip the intro/credits" option. It is an adblocking extension first and foremost, but I still kind of recommend checking it out even if you don't plan to block ads with it because you might still find the other categories useful.

I don't - the creator already got paid... and if it devalues ads to the point of sponsors no longer trying to inject marketing into videos and creators relying on patreon/similar I think we'd be in a better world.

> creators relying on patreon/similar I think we'd be in a better world.

so do you sign on to any patreons for any of the creators you watched?

I do, I'm currently subscribed to three youtubers' patreon. I'm not subscribed to any large creators but rather to a few really niche ones.

Yeah, sponsor sections of content is usually done respectfully of the audience. There's no javascript being run on my machine, the sponsor is usually tangentially related to the content, and the creator has an incentive to deliver it in either a humorous or relevant manner.

>Yeah, sponsor sections of content is usually done respectfully of the audience.

I literally just LOL'd and spit water at my screen reading that. They are the most condescending over the top waaaaay too long of a segment. Even in the 1950's, sponsors were just mentioned along the lines of "This segment is brought to you by Ovaltine. Remember to drink your Ovaltine!" and then moves right the fuck along. But nooooo, youtube sponsors took the SNL idea of play it until it's uncomfortably long, then keep going until it's just funny that they haven't stopped, but then continue until you just feel like a sad sap for continuing to have this product/service talked about like it is the second coming. Respectful. As. If.

Maybe you should watch other creators then. IME better creators have higher respect for their audiences and create better, even entertaining sponsor segments.

I have even been introduced to services I pay for now via these segments. Nebula, Backblaze, DBrand, and Audible are some of them.

I used to think that too, but then i installed sponsorblock. It's like the skipped segment wasn't even there (well, duh). What i mean is that if i skip a segment of the video and not notice it, was it really relevant and well-integrated?

You weren't introduced to these services, you got advertised to. How many raid shadow legend ads did you sit through to hear about backblaze once? Did you ever hear about backblaze from a more reputable source? Did you consider alternatives to backblaze before paying for their services?

>IME better creators have higher respect for their audiences and create better, even entertaining sponsor segments.

This teeters on the verge of being a shill's comment. This concept of "creators" being any different than any other social media "influencer" that is doing things for clicks/likes/subscribes opposed to "respecting" their audience is just farcical. Are there various degrees of their insincerity, of course.

I never drank the social media Kool-aid. I find it very disconcerting how many people from the social media generations actually believe that these "creators" shilling products are anything more than what they actually are.

I already pay for Youtube Premium which pays the creator in return for ad-free viewing. I don't really see a difference between ads from youtube's platform vs ones embedded in the video content.

Yea, they aren’t stalking you everywhere you go, and they don’t install malware on your device.

There's only so many times I need to hear about Ridge wallet, Surfshark, Manscaped, and Raid: Shadow Legends.

I don't. If the video is streamed to my machine I get to filter it before I consume it. Youtubers make money from merch sales, donations, subscriptions, live events and more. If I want to support someone I find out how to donate to them but I don't feel bad about filtering out ad reads.

It skips sponsor segments using the SponsorBlock API and can also skip/mute YouTube ads. Devices don't need to be on the same lan to work

Just installed and it works amazingly well.

I have YT premium and now this removed all the annoying integrated ads as well.

That’s great to hear

This is a godsend for my yt premium subscription. Now I can really enjoy watching yt on my tv without watching ads since I pay anyway, will test this weekend. Big thanks to developers!

I don't understand how can people trust a random app or extension just to have a little convinience. When it comes to big tech people are very privacy conscious. But it's not always big tech may have privacy leaks or would sell your data directly to data brokers most of the time, it's small apps like this.

I'm not saying developer is doing that, but they have power to do so. This app sends every video you're watching to their api, https://sponsor.ajay.app/api/ , and they can do whatever they want with this data. When small apps like this becames popular, they start receiving offers from data brokers/malware business and sometimes developers sell the data or the whole app without even knowing that the data will be used for bad purposes.

> But it's not always big tech may have privacy leaks or would sell your data directly to data brokers most of the time, it's small apps like this.

Do you have any data to back this up

If you're following HN regularly, I'm sure you'd see many issues especially for sold Chrome extensions. Really need data? Maybe check these:

[1]https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[2]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/07/datas...

[3]https://dataspii.com/

What mechanism does it use to block the ads?

It blocks sponsored content using SponsorBlock[0], which uses crowdsourced data to detect segments in video's and skips them (basically fast forwards over the content).

[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

I had a peek and it looks like it's the youtube lounge API. Basically this is casting with some bonus features. If you are playing on a Screen (a tv or console) then Remotes (usually your phone) can automatically notice it and automatically show what is playing, let you use controls, add stuff to the playlist etc.

This program registers a remote and automatically skips forward when a sponsorblock segment is present.

Very neatly explained. I can confirm it does exactly that

Such an awesome piece work. Great job!

> "Basically this is casting with some bonus features. If you are playing on a Screen (a tv or console) then Remotes (usually your phone) can automatically notice it and automatically show what is playing, let you use controls, add stuff to the playlist etc. This program registers a remote and automatically skips forward when a sponsorblock segment is present. "

Thank you for the explanation @jabroni_salad : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37873749#37876128

Hey dmunozv04, would this work on a old Raspberry Pi 3? I'm getting the following error and I'm thinking it might not be supported;

> docker: no matching manifest for linux/arm/v6 in the manifest list entries.

Would it work on a raspberry 4 maybe or even a raspberry 5?

If not any of the above, is there a low power mini-pc type option that you recommend?

Thanks

Not dmunozv04 - you need to install the 64bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (unfortunately not the default) as the project does not provide ArmV6 images with Docker. Or build your docker image/run it outside of docker.

Ok thanks. I have the OG pi which is only 32bit. I’ll try to pickup a Pi3 from eBay and test with that

Does youtube pass information about which parts of videos are skipped back to the people that uploaded them?

(Wondering if this directly affects sponsorship revenue.)

YouTube recently started showing a graph highlighting what sections of the video are watched more (when seeking with the cursor), so I assume they actually give creators proper metrics about this, and it could hurt revenue if sponsors ask to know the difference in watch time between their segment and the rest of the video

Yea - if you're manually skipping sponsored segments this is actually hilariously useful since when seeking through the video there will be a big spike at the end of every sponsored segment from all the sponsor block users.

Now if only you could do the same thing for other streaming apps. I’ve tried some dns blocking but it tends to just mess things up.

Sponsor block doesn't actually block anything - it just instantly fast-forwards over embedded advertisements and intros/outros.

Wow this works great! Just took 5 minutes to set up. Is now up and running on my docker vm so it‘s always working.

I use https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip that is the same and its great, it also mutes the ads while waiting to be skipped.

Its unclear from the readme, but does this block ads on devices that support casting or only block ads when you are casting? Will it interfere if I have sponsorblock already running on my Android TV?

Also why does this program need to be completely rewritten so many times to eliminate performance issues with the previous version?

Does this impede connecting to the TV/console with another device simultaneously?

I just tested it and it works just fine. YouTube seems to support multiple “mobile” devices connected to a single TV/console

love this, now to find a guide how to set it up on my synology

There's a docker image with some instructions on Wiki, shouldn't be too tricky to transfer over. If I end up making it work I'll do a PR for the project wiki for Synology install steps.

AFAIK some people have used it on synology successfully in the past. A PR including specific steps would be amazing though

I spent about a month looking for detailed guides on how to add individual services to my Synology and just constantly being frustrated.

Then I found an extremely detailed but very opinionated guide on how to setup a suite of apps with docker compose and ssh because the author's were very much against the GUI and built in apps. It's been a much smoother and easier experience installing services since I no longer need to seek out half baked guides on someone who got it working good enough for them on their NAS.

Link?

The Docker instructions work well, I set it up on my Unraid server.

seems like a good project to integration with ChatGPT video and figure out ways to automatically insert start & end times for sponsors, interaction reminders, intro, outro, etc. With a little training, this could be fully automated accurately.

Would love to see some ultralight version of this that I can just run directly on my router.

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible. The router can only intercept as far as DNS goes, and DNS Blocklists are already incapable of blocking YouTube ads.

Routers run operating systems like everything else does though. What would make my OpenWRT router running this any different from another device on the network?

Encryption

It only has access to the encrypted payload, while the client has access to the decrypted payload.

The service doesn't deal with encrypted payloads. It just integrates with YouTube's lounge api. As long as a machine is able to run this and is connected to the internet, that should be enough.

You can run Docker on Mikrotik's RouterOS[1]. I doubt performance is anywhere close to great though, but it'd be interesting to try.

[1]: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Container

Do I need to setup anything on the TV or does this just work?

You just need to run the tool on a server/computer and connect the TV to it

Looks like the compatible TVs have an interface (UPnP/DLNA?) that can presumably be queried to ask "What video is playing?", and "How far along are you in the video?", as well as accepting commands like "Skip to x:xx".

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