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.

  • Beryl@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    SmartTube is what the YouTube app should be. I’ve been using it for I think 2 years now and it works like a charm, is super stable, offers loads of customization options, and the interface is better and more complete than the official app. Truly a must have for any Android tv box.