A small utility to skip integrated ads on youtube when played on chromecasts

aurman -S castblock-git

x86 and ARM Docker images are available from DockerHub as stephen304/castblock:latest

docker pull stephen304/castblock:latest
docker run --network="host" stephen304/castblock

• Install the prerequisites:
  • go-chromecast
  • jq - sudo apt-get install jq
  • bc - sudo apt-get install bc
  • cmp
  • timeout
• Put castblock in /usr/bin/
• Put castblock.service in /usr/lib/systemd/system/

Run castblock while on the same LAN as chromecast devices.

Alternatively, enable and start castblock.service to run in the background. Ensure castblock exists in /usr/bin/ and castblock.service exists in /usr/lib/systemd/system/ as above, then run:

1. sudo systemctl start castblock
2. Check the service has started by running sudo systemctl status castblock
3. And finally, in order to run at boot, type sudo systemctl enable castblock

It should automatically detect all chromecasts on the LAN, keep track of what's playing, and automatically skip sponsors using the SponsorBlock API.

• May not work with smart TV youtube apps that support cast - dedicated chromecast device required
• May not detect all chromecasts, does not rescan. If your chromecast is now shown, try re-running
• Start of skipping is based on polling and may miss the starting split second of a segment
• Segments shorter than 5 seconds are ignored - seeking on chromecast always causes buffering making skipping super short segments have questionable value
• Segments less than 10 seconds after a previous segment may play partially or fully due to the post skip timeout which prevents double skipping
• Script may not cleanly exit / may leave running threads/processes. Fight me. Or make a pull request. Your choice.

I welcome all suggestions / code for the above issues as well as other discussion on how to improve the script. Feel free to open an issue or PR with any contributions.