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.
that is a terrible UX lol, the main youtube app for TV is absolute dogwater, it’s slow and it even crashes fairly often. im not going to swap apps for this. browser is even worse
Oh I agree that it’s terrible, and that’s what you should be expecting with ads, as a majority of the money goes towards funding the terrible YouTube experience. If you really want to support your content creators, send them money directly. $5 directly to them will improve their lives more than 3¢. If you don’t want to go as far as directly funding them, try patreon even.