Good news! yt-dlp already has sponsorblock built-in :-) Have a look in the --help text output for the "sponsorblock-remove" arg.

Just saw the other comment! Thank you!

wow... thank you!

either use and nvidous instance that had sponsorblock(?) or use mpv with the sponsorblock script in your program

just fyi, but this already exists via platforms like invidious, which is like a self-hosted youtube proxy that you interact with, and it dumps files to disk/etc. there are some other similar things already too.

not that you shouldn't use yt-dlp, because it's great!

and yes, as others mention - you can have yt-dlp use sponsorblock to cut out the ad sections too.

At the point where you're removing sponsor messages within a downloaded copy - of hope you're also sponsoring on patron or buying merch or something. There's a point where there needs to be some sort of revenue source to incentivize further content creation