How to Download YouTube Videos Without Sponsors (SponsorBlock Integration Guide)
SponsorBlock works great in browsers — but what about downloaded videos? Here's how Fetchii integrates SponsorBlock directly into the download process, so your saved videos are already clean.
You know what's worse than a sponsor segment in a YouTube video? A sponsor segment in a downloaded YouTube video. When you're watching in the browser, SponsorBlock handles it automatically — the segment skips, you barely notice. But download that same video to your Mac, and suddenly you're scrubbing through 90 seconds of someone talking about a VPN every time you watch it.
That bothered me. So I built SponsorBlock integration directly into Fetchii. Now those segments get removed during the download itself — before the video even hits your disk.
What SponsorBlock Actually Is
SponsorBlock is a community project that maintains a crowd-sourced database of timestamps for YouTube videos. Volunteers watch videos, mark where each segment starts and ends, and those marks get submitted to a public API. The browser extension uses this data to auto-skip segments while you watch.
The thing that makes it work is the community. There are millions of submitted segments across hundreds of thousands of videos. It's not perfect — new videos won't have any data yet, and some segments get mis-labeled — but for popular videos, the coverage is pretty good.
Importantly, SponsorBlock isn't just for sponsor ads. It tracks 8 different types of segments, which we'll get into below.
The Problem: Browser Extensions Can't Help Downloaded Videos
The SponsorBlock browser extension is great for live watching. But once you've got a video file, the extension can't do anything with it. Your downloaded .mp4 has the sponsor segment baked in, at a specific byte offset in the file. There's no way to skip it automatically in QuickTime or VLC without some extra tooling.
The workaround for technical users is yt-dlp's built-in SponsorBlock support — you pass --sponsorblock-remove sponsor,intro,outro and it strips those segments during download. It works well, but it means dropping to the terminal, remembering the right flags, and doing it manually every time.
What I wanted was for this to just... happen. You decide once that you don't want sponsors in your downloaded videos, and then you never have to think about it again.
Enabling SponsorBlock in Fetchii
SponsorBlock is off by default — it makes network requests to the SponsorBlock API and modifies the video, so it felt wrong to enable it without you knowing. Here's how to turn it on:
- Open Fetchii and go to Settings (⌘,)
- Click the Advanced tab
- Under the SponsorBlock section, toggle it on
- Choose your action: Remove segments or Mark as chapters
- Check or uncheck the categories you care about
Once enabled, every YouTube download goes through the SponsorBlock API. Fetchii fetches the community-submitted timestamps for that video, then uses yt-dlp to either cut those segments out entirely or embed them as chapter markers — depending on which action you chose.
The default action is Remove segments, and the default enabled categories are Sponsor, Self-promotion, Intro, and Outro. You can change these to whatever makes sense for you.
The 8 Categories
Here's what each category actually covers, in plain language:
Sponsor
The obvious stuff. "This video is brought to you by..." — a company paying the creator to mention their product. Usually a minute or two, sometimes longer, usually mid-video. This is the one most people want to remove.
Self-promotion
The creator promoting their own stuff — merch store, Patreon, membership tier, newsletter, Discord server. Different from a paid sponsor because there's no advertiser, but the effect is the same: content you probably didn't come for.
Interaction reminder
"If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe." Usually just a few seconds. Low stakes either way, but it adds up across a lot of videos.
Intro
Channel logos, animated jingles, "welcome back to the channel" openers. Some creators have 30-second intros that play on every single video. Once you've seen it five times, you've seen it enough.
Outro
End cards, "thanks for watching," subscriber asks, next-video recommendations. These often overlap with YouTube's own end screen — the last 20 seconds of a lot of videos is just a grid of thumbnail links anyway.
Preview / Recap
Two flavors: a teaser at the start that shows you what's coming in the video (effectively a spoiler of your own watch), or a recap of previous episodes for serialized content. Both are optional context.
Non-music section
Specific to music videos. When a musician uploads a music video but includes talking — an intro monologue, an explanation of the song, an outro — this category marks those non-music parts. Useful if you just want the actual track.
Filler
Tangents, padding, and content that doesn't contribute to the main point of the video. This is the most subjective category, and coverage varies a lot. Some creators use it for obvious padding; others don't have any.
Remove vs. Mark as Chapters
The Remove segments action cuts those portions out of the video file entirely. The resulting file is shorter — if a video had four minutes of sponsors and intros, your downloaded file is four minutes shorter. It's clean.
Mark as chapters leaves the video intact but embeds chapter markers at each segment boundary. When you open the file in a compatible player, you can see and jump between chapters. The segment is still there — you just know exactly where it starts and ends.
I use Remove segments almost exclusively. The only time I'd reach for Mark as chapters is if I wanted to keep the full video for reference — like archiving a conference talk where the sponsor segment might actually be relevant context.
You can also combine both actions by choosing "Mark as chapters" for some categories and "Remove segments" for others — though Fetchii currently applies one action to all selected categories at once. If you want different actions per category, that's a potential future feature.
A Note on the Community Data
Because SponsorBlock is crowd-sourced, the quality of the data depends on the video. Popular videos with active communities tend to have well-labeled, accurate timestamps. Newer videos might have no data at all, or data that hasn't been reviewed yet.
If a video has no SponsorBlock data, Fetchii just downloads it normally — no segments removed, no error. You only get the filtering when the community has submitted timestamps for that video.
Occasionally, segments get mis-labeled. Someone might mark a legitimate part of the video as a sponsor, or the timestamps might be slightly off. It's rare on popular videos, but worth knowing. The SponsorBlock project has a voting and review system to catch these, but no automated system is perfect.
SponsorBlock is a third-party community project, not affiliated with Fetchii or YouTube. The timestamp data is submitted by volunteers and may not cover all videos or categories. Fetchii uses the public SponsorBlock API to fetch this data during download.
The Result
Once you've set it up, you don't think about it anymore. You download a YouTube video, and when you open it, it just... starts. No sponsor. No intro jingle you've seen a hundred times. No "please like and subscribe" at the end.
It's one of those features that doesn't sound impressive until you've had it for a week and then watched a downloaded video without it.
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