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.

  • Carlos Solís@communities.azkware.net
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    1 year ago

    My only issue with Newpipe is that I can't sync my "watch later" list with Google's servers. That, and I can't reply to comments straight from the app. Otherwise I'd probably be using either that or Piped.

    • Forklift Certified@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That makes sense, comments are an issue with NewPipe. Please open an issue on the NewPipe GitHub about that and the watch-later list.

      The functionality will only get added if users ask for it. The idea for NewPipe in the beginning was a light-weight YouTube frontend with offline subscriptions ( i.e. no need to login ). Bits and bobs got added as and when user requests came in.