⏭️ Skip YouTube ads and sponsorships on all local Google Cast devices
A Go program that skips sponsored YouTube content and skippable ads on all local Google Cast devices, using the SponsorBlock API. This project was inspired by sponsorblockcast, but written from scratch to decrease memory and CPU usage, and to work around some of its problems (see Differences from sponsorblockcast).
When run, this program will watch all Google Cast devices on the LAN. If a Cast device begins playing a YouTube video, sponsored segments are fetched from the SponsorBlock API. When the device reaches a sponsored segment, the CastSponsorSkip will quickly seek to the end of the segment.
Additionally, CastSponsorSkip will look for skippable YouTube ads, and automatically hit the skip button when it becomes available.
You can install Docker directly or use Docker Compose (Or use Podman, Portainer, etc). Please note you MUST use the host
network as shown below for cli or in the example docker-compose
file.
Run the below commands as root or a member of the docker
group:
docker run --network=host --name=castsponsorskip ghcr.io/gabe565/castsponsorskip
First you will need a docker-compose.yaml
file, such as the one included in this repo. Run the below commands as root or a member of the docker
group:
docker compose up -d
A Home Assistant addon is provided by @alexbelgium and @bruvv. See alexbelgium/hassio-addons for installation instructions.
If you don't have it already, install the ca-certificates
package
sudo apt install ca-certificates
Add gabe565 apt repository
echo 'deb [trusted=yes] https://apt.gabe565.com /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gabe565.list
Update apt repositories
sudo apt update
Install CastSponsorSkip
sudo apt install castsponsorskip
If you don't have it already, install the ca-certificates
package
sudo dnf install ca-certificates
Add gabe565 rpm repository to /etc/yum.repos.d/gabe565.repo
[gabe565]
name=gabe565
baseurl=https://rpm.gabe565.com
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
Install CastSponsorSkip
sudo dnf install castsponsorskip
Install castsponsorskip-bin with your AUR helper of choice.
Install CastSponsorSkip from gabe565/homebrew-tap:
brew install gabe565/tap/castsponsorskip
CastSponsorSkip doesn't require a Service or Ingress, so it's simple to host in Kubernetes with a single Deployment. The only gotcha is that hostNetwork
must be enabled for device discovery to work.
A Helm chart is available to make Kubernetes deployment even simpler. For more information, see charts.gabe565.com or Artifact Hub.
Download and run the latest release binary for your system and architecture.
Run castsponsorskip
from a terminal or activate the service with systemd:
systemctl enable --now castsponsorskip
Use brew services to start CastSponsorSkip:
brew services start castsponsorskip
CastSponsorSkip can be configured with envs, command-line flags, or a config file. Some notable envs are listed below, but all flags can be set with envs.
To use an env that is not listed here, capitalize all characters, replace -
with _
, and prefix with CSS_
. For example, --paused-interval=1m
would become CSS_PAUSED_INTERVAL=1m
.
Env | Description | Default |
---|---|---|
CSS_DISCOVER_INTERVAL |
Interval to restart the DNS discovery client. | 5m |
CSS_PAUSED_INTERVAL |
Time to wait between each poll of the Cast device status when paused. | 1m |
CSS_PLAYING_INTERVAL |
Time to wait between each poll of the Cast device status when playing. | 500ms |
CSS_CATEGORIES |
Comma-separated list of SponsorBlock categories to skip, see category list and category breakdown. | sponsor |
CSS_YOUTUBE_API_KEY |
YouTube API key for fallback video identification (required on some Chromecast devices). | |
CSS_MUTE_ADS |
Mutes the device while an ad is playing. | true |
CSS_DEVICES |
Comma-separated list of device addresses. This will disable discovery and is not recommended unless discovery fails. | [] |
CSS_SKIP_SPONSORS |
Toggles sponsored segment skipping via the SponsorBlock API. If disabled, only YouTube ads will be skipped. | true |
[!NOTE] sponsorblockcast envs are also supported to simplify the migration to CastSponsorSkip. When used, a deprecation warning will be logged with an updated env key and value. There are currently no plans to remove these envs.
See command-line flag documentation here.
To modify the variables when running as a systemd service, create an override for the service with:
sudo systemctl edit castsponsorskip.service
This will open a blank override file where you can specify environment variables like so:
[Service]
Environment="CSS_PAUSED_INTERVAL=1m"
Environment="CSS_PLAYING_INTERVAL=1s"
Environment="CSS_CATEGORIES=sponsor,selfpromo"
To modify the variables when running as a Docker container, you can add arguments to the docker run
command like so:
docker run --network=host --env CSS_PAUSED_INTERVAL=5m --env CSS_PLAYING_INTERVAL=2s --name=castsponsorskip ghcr.io/gabe565/castsponsorskip
When using docker-compose.yaml
, you can simply edit the environment
directive as shown in the example file.
go-chromecast
. This means go-chromecast
functions can be called directly instead of relying on shell scripts, child commands, or string parsing.go-chromecast
only needs to be loaded once within a single Go program, resulting in lower memory usage.I own 12 Google Cast devices, and have compared CPU and memory usage of the two programs. Note that CPU usage is measured in "milliCPU", meaning that 1m is equal to 1/1000 of a CPU. Here are the averages:
Program | CPU | Memory |
---|---|---|
sponsorblockcast | 75m | 70Mi |
castsponsorskip | 1m | 10Mi |