What Is SponsorBlock?
SponsorBlock is a crowdsourced database of skippable segments inside YouTube videos, covering sponsor reads, intros, outros, self promotion and unrelated filler. Apps and extensions that support it look up a video's segments and jump past them as it plays.
How SponsorBlock works
When a video starts, the client asks the SponsorBlock server for segments. It sends only the first few characters of a hash of the video ID, and receives every segment matching that prefix, then picks out the ones for the video you are watching. The server therefore never learns exactly what you played. All skipping happens locally: the client seeks past the timestamps it was given, and the video file itself is untouched.
Where it is available
SponsorBlock started as a browser extension and is now built into a range of clients: ReVanced as a selectable patch, SmartTube on Android TV, LibreTube, Tubular and FreeTube. YouTube Vanced carried it too until the project ended in March 2022. Support is at the client's discretion, so the same segment data behaves slightly differently depending on which app is reading it.
How submissions work
Anyone using a supporting client can mark a segment and submit it with a category attached. Other users vote submissions up or down, and a contributor whose submissions are repeatedly rejected loses influence. Coverage follows attention: a large channel usually has segments within hours of upload, while a small one may never be marked at all.
Using it in ReVanced
In ReVanced, SponsorBlock is a patch you select at build time rather than a setting you can add later. Once installed, each category has its own behavior: skip silently, show a button and let you decide, or ignore. Setting sponsor segments to skip automatically while leaving intros and outros manual is a common arrangement, since intro timings are the ones most likely to be marked slightly wrong.
Common misconceptions
SponsorBlock does not block YouTube's own ads, which are a separate mechanism handled by different patches. It does not remove anything from the video or change what the creator is paid, since the segment still counts as watched from YouTube's perspective, it is simply skipped in your player. It is also not perfect: segments are occasionally wrong or badly timed, and the fix for that is voting rather than turning the feature off.
Before you install
Always download patchers, GmsCore, and APK bases from official project pages or trusted mirrors listed in our safety guides. Mismatched versions are the most common cause of playback and login failures after setup.