Homelab, Linux, JS & ABAP (~˘▾˘)~
 

Tag: SponsorBlock

YouTube

[YouTube] VacuumTube

 , , ,

I’ve been using my Proxmox HTPC for six years now. All this time, I’ve been watching YouTube via YouTube Leanback in a full-screen Firefox Browser window. This is most of the time working fine, but from time to time you have to change the user-agent if something stops working or the video quality is poor for some reason.

And while I was once again searching for a new user-agent which improves the YouTube Leanback experience, I randomly stumbled on VacuumTube. This was something I always wanted/needed for my HTPC! Using Firefox was working fine, and I could also use all Firefox Extensions that exists for YouTube. But it also has drawbacks, like keyboard shortcuts were not working well (depending on the user-agent used) or, as mentioned already, the video quality is sometimes limited. Therefore, I gave VacuumTube a try and must say, since then it is working perfectly! With version v1.4.0 it even got SponsorBlock integrated! Right now, there is really no feature missing for me.

What I recently found is, that you can save videos to your Watch later playlist without starting to play the actual video. Simply long press the enter key on your keyboard and select “Save to Watch later” on the menu that appears. At least in Firefox, none of the user agents I tested were able to do that. Really cool!

Another handy feature is that you can turn the subtitles on and off using the ‘C’ key.

YouTube

[YouTube] Combine Metube & SponsorBlock

 , , , , , , ,

I have been using MeTube for some time to occasionally download YouTube videos. Now I’ve been looking for a way to combine MeTube with SponsorBlock to get rid of the ads when downloading a file. And it turned out to be possible. You can either use SponsorBlock to add a chapter for an ad segment, or you can use it to remove the ad or any other segment using the remove_sponsor_segments parameter. Currently, it is not possible to do both things (create segment chapters + remove segments). Here the solution to remove ads while downloading:

Create the following JSON File:

{
  "postprocessors": [
    {
      "api": "https://sponsor.ajay.app/",
      "categories": [
        "intro",
        "outro",
        "poi_highlight",
        "selfpromo",
        "sponsor",
        "interaction" 
      ],
      "key": "SponsorBlock",
      "when": "after_filter"
    },
    {
      "force_keyframes": false,
      "key": "ModifyChapters",
      "remove_chapters_patterns": [],
      "remove_ranges": [],
      "remove_sponsor_segments": ["sponsor","interaction","selfpromo"],
      "sponsorblock_chapter_title": "'[SponsorBlock]: ''%(category_names)l'"
    },
    {
      "add_chapters": true,
      "add_infojson": "none",
      "add_metadata": false,
      "key": "FFmpegMetadata"
    }
  ]
}

The relevant parts here are the categories:

  • intro — video intro segments
  • outro — video endings or credits
  • sponsor — sponsored ads/segments to skip
  • selfpromo — creator self-promotion clips
  • interaction — calls to action (like “subscribe” asks)
  • poi_highlight — important highlights or notable moments (Points of Interest)

And the remove_sponsor_segments parameter. Here you can provide all sections you want to have removed during a download.

The last step is to mount the JSON File into the Container:

version: '3'

services:
  metube:
    image: alexta69/metube
    container_name: metube
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8081:8081"
    volumes:
      - ./downloads:/downloads
      - ./ytdl_options.json:/config/ytdl_options.json:ro # the first part must be the path/place of your new created json file
    environment:
      - YTDL_OPTIONS_FILE=/config/ytdl_options.json

To add video links to MeTube you can also use this handy Browser Add-on: MeTube Downloader

Update 28.07.2025: Since MeTube version 2025-07-27, changes to the YTDL_OPTIONS_FILE are monitored and do not require a container restart to take effect.

Update 12.04.2026: To automatically pull the latest MeTube image, I also added watchtower to my docker-compose file. With the option WATCHTOWER_CLEANUP=true, old images are automatically removed.

  watchtower:
    image: containrrr/watchtower
    container_name: watchtower
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    environment:
      - WATCHTOWER_CLEANUP=true
      - WATCHTOWER_POLL_INTERVAL=86400
    command: metube watchtower