CastBlock, Sponsorblock for Chromecasted videos

Feature Requests
1

It’s recently come to my attention that there exist a utility based on SponsorBlock that is called “castblock”.

SponsorBlock is a web-browser extension that makes it possible to mark segments of youtube videos as sponsored content and after a segment is marked that segment will auto-skip for all users of the extension.

CastBlock makes it possible to auto-skip these reported segments on Youtube videos that are chromecasted on the whole LAN.

It would be great if we could get an integration officialy or through HACS to support a castblock installation in Home Assistant.

More information about castblock is found here: https://github.com/stephen304/castblock

2

Upvote, this would be a great feature to add together with adguard. Youtube ads are getting crazy…

1 Like
3

I finally got some time to tinker with Castblock and managed to have it running on a HassOS deployment quite easy, however an official addon would make things even simpler.

Here are the steps:

  1. Install Portainer Add-on
  2. go to Portainer > Containers > Add container
  3. Fill Name: Castblock, image: stephen304/castblock:latest
  4. go to Network > select network type > host
  5. go to Restart Policy > select Always
  6. Click on deploy the container.

The container should be running and restarting automatically in case of a reboot. Check the container logs to see if it is running. You should see a list of all Chromecast devices detected, such as:

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637243000Z --±-------±------------±------------+

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637325000Z | 0 | Chromecast | Kitchen TV |

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637395000Z --±-------±------------±------------+

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637468000Z | START | END | TYPE |

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637531000Z | | | |

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637599000Z --±-------±------------±------------+

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637665000Z --±-------±-------------------±----------+

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637733000Z | 0 | Google Cast Group | Surround |

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637801000Z --±-------±-------------------±----------+

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637867000Z | START | END | TYPE |

2020-11-10T02:41:03.637954000Z | | | |

2020-11-10T02:41:03.638037000Z --±-------±-------------------±----------+

However, be aware that castblock uses a LOT of cpu…see https://github.com/stephen304/castblock/issues/13

For reference, there are two more similar projects under development based on Sponsorblock: