Feature: Silence skip

[some-git-user]

Pull Request Type

• Bugfix
• Feature Implementation
• Documentation
• Other

Related issue

closes #1766

Description

This PR implements a simple silence skip logic, to dynamically determine silent video parts, related to the individual max volume of the audio source.

Screenshots

2025-08-08.16-34-21.mp4

Testing

• Open any video (prefer a podcast with silent or mute parts between conversations).
• Toggle the function via the red "Skip Silence" gauge Icon Button located in the Watch Video Info area.
• Watch the player "enable" notification popup.
• Watch/hear the player increasing playback speed between silent/mute audio parts.
• Toggle the function again, watch the player "disable" notification popup and speed fallback to default.

Desktop

• OS: debian
• OS Version: 12
• FreeTube version: v0.23.5 Beta

Additional context

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

Remove all the locale files. Only keep en-us

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

Im a bit confused by this skip rate. Please elaborate why you chose for 2.5x instead of e.g. 10x

Lets say the ending of a certain video is 60sec it will take 24sec to skip the silence. Thats way too long imo.

Why not detect when there is no audio and detect when audio is playing again and instantly skip towards that timestamp instead of relying on playback rate to handle this

[some-git-user]

Im a bit confused by this skip rate. Please elaborate why you chose for 2.5x instead of e.g. 10x

Lets say the ending of a certain video is 60sec it will take 24sec to skip the silence. Thats way too long imo.

Why not detect when there is no audio and detect when audio is playing again and instantly skip towards that timestamp instead of relying on playback rate to handle this
the

The main goal of this feature is to skip (accelerate) silence between conversations, or other silent parts, not to fast forward to the end of a video.
I tried different speed steps with multiple videos and 2.5x was the best one in my tests, since faster steps could also "cut off" the beginning of the next non silent part.

I'm not sure how to "detect when there is no audio and detect when audio is playing again and instantly skip towards that timestamp" .
Maybe I'm wrong here, but to know this you must buffer and analyze the whole video before the playback start, so the code knows the parts with no audio.
I also tried to create a little UI, to let the user make individual changes for every video, to match the needed audio threshold, but I'm not familiar with Vue and the lack of Typescript made it even harder for me to get into this project.

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

This implementation works really well, especially considering that our player is the limiting factor in this case.

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

I would like to be a button for this inside the player instead of outside the player

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

• Please move the icon to the left of the autoplay icon
• It should remember its state in the watch session. Examples -> #5903 #6449
• It probably also should receive a toggle in the Player settings called Enable [name of the feature] by Default