Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It’s an awful experience. But they’ll leave my browser before my adblocker does.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
So say we all.
So say we all.
Amen.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
just use invidious instead
This is also a good beginner way to learn about self hosting in docker.
Freetube can make a great backup for when google inevitably breaks something.
And for thise videos you really cant miss there is always yt-dlp scripted to download a channels latests video on a schedule straight to jellyfin of course.
I have not visited the youtube website in more then a year.
It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in
This doesn’t seem very straightforward…
it’s like lemmy: you choose an instance, make an account, import your subscriptions from YouTube and done. you can watch all channels from there
Sadly, most of the instances seem to be completely nonfunctional. Nadeko.net seemed to be the only one working for months.
yehh it’s been a while since i used it and my instance seems to be down too…
Ok, so there are hosted instances? At face value this looks like you need to self host. Which I am more than capable of both in terms of equipment and experience. I just don’t want to go that far to watch youtube. Thanks for explaining.
not many but there are
So it’s not very straight forward lol?
for us it is ;)
Same. When I opened the Stats for Nerds pop-up, I noticed that I was being throttled to 1500kbps. Anything above 720p was unplayable this week.
But apparently the Ublock Origin devs yet again figured out another workaround, because streaming speeds are back to normal for me as of yesterday.
I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they’re likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but…I’m sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It’ll be a UX hit, so it’ll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can’t stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don’t require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
can’t stop us from HDMI capturing
Look up HDCP.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
it’s not hard to do it yourself either
How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I’ve never looked into this.
Open PassDCP software is one method, or you can obtain a splitter that strips hdcp
They aren’t fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
strip out the HDCP
Interesting, I had figured that was possible in principle but hadn’t kept up with what was actually around.
But still, the HDCP stream is decompressed video, so if you want to save it, you’ll have to either put it through yet another layer or lossy compression, or burn a ridiculous amount of disk space compared to the compressed stream that Youtube sent to your computer.
We’ll see how things go. Google in the past has made occasional modest gestures to get in the way of downloading, but they haven’t made serious effort to prevent it. Who knows whether that will last.
It’s certainly not an ideal solution, but it’s an option that will usually work.
I break HDCP right now. Those keys have been leaked for AGES. $10 amazon HDMI copy in between your videocard and the capture.
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using
yt-dlp, and for a while YouTube required an account (which I will not get) from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
I’d just hop a vps around to different countries.
…I’d never do it here, admins, honest lol
Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I’m that level of anal
I’m not really following video DRM, but my understanding is that Widevine won’t run in a VM with a virtualized video card like that.
theoretically anything is possible so what
Right. At the end of the bullshit, the content still plays to completion if the user hits play. We can script and Ai and remove ads all day long after a program snags the feed.
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it’s an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I’m quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven’t seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they’re working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
I would but my issue with that is that SponsorBlock doesn’t work on downloaded videos.
Skytube has an option for clipping mid-video ads out of downloaded videos, if that helps.
I use SponsorBlock for more than just skipping sponsored segments. It’s also useful for skipping intros, “like and subscribe” messages, and other general annoyances in most YouTube videos. Once you get used to it, you can’t go without.
Same here. The SponsorBlock in SkyTube skips intros and “like and subscribe”, too. Even in downloads.
Good to know, thanks.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
Me too. I’m up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
I’ve been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it’s made me paranoid ha
I’d sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Too true
Truth
Welcome back to 2007
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I’ll do that before watching an ad.
A wild YouTube appeared!
Go, uBlock Origin!
Wild YouTube used Throttle!
It’s not very effective…
uBlock Origin used Evolve!
It’s super effective!
YouTube fainted!
This made me laugh. I wonder which one will prevail in the end
Piracy always prevails
Very good news!!
Is it possible to post the same video both to youtube and peertube without trouble? I wonder if this is prohibited cause I think many creators would mirror their content to peertube if they could.
Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
A lot of my favorites are already on Nebula. I’d ask the rest to follow but that would require a google account.
I also asked some creators, but they can’t because of the Google partnership Programm, it prohibits reupload on other platforms
Great idea. Eventually, and if enough ask, it could be a thing.
I love how you’re just doing your bit lol
I watched videos on Newgrounds using dial-up
They are going to have to slow ad blockers by a lot for me to consider it slow
My wife and I were discussing this. This isnt “slow” to us, its just a tiny bit inconvenient. We were used to the old AOL pictures taking a good minute or two to load.
We would get rid of Youtube before we get ads.
Ahh seeing images load line-by-line and you get excited as you can actually start to tell what the image is!
“Finally, a nipple!”
I’ve been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me “ad blockers aren’t allowed” at work where I’m forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.
uBlock Lite is simply not as potent, so it’s understandable it can be beaten. Almost like Google is abusing their monopoly
I run portable Firefox on my work PC. I refuse to use chrome. some of our apps require Edge, but outside of that, I don’t touch chrome.
I switched to Firefox basically as soon as ublock origin didn’t work on chrome. It was easier than I thought it would be.
So it’s wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice…
We can live without YouTube, they can’t live without us.
This is their way to try and get you into their money making fold.
Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
Edit: I put more details under nameisnotimportant’s comment, I was about to head to bed so I didn’t really provide details LOL
fixed it by blocking the element
Which one? That’d certainly help to know how to do that
www.youtube.com/##.paper-toast-open.yt-notification-action-renderer.style-scope.toast-button
I believe it was this one, just add it as part of the filter list in ublock
The extension I used for user agent was this one. I don’t think it matters what you spoof as, but I chose to spoof as chrome. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
So far it worked and I’m back to no ads and no interruptions
Thanks, I’ll have a look at this later and I’m sure it’ll prove useful for everyone!
Okay, I am trying to add it. Just copy your YouTube stuff -> go to myFilters -> paste?
Yea, I have a couple more that I forget does what (I think a couple are for hiding youtube games and shorts and stuff), but it should just look like this in my filters.
Ty so very much kind person.
Lemme know if they ever reply.
Yes they did! See right above or direct link https://sh.itjust.works/comment/19270078
I have ublock, with sponsor block and some others, and don’t have any issues on yt as of yet. Just in case though, how do I block an element and spoof a user agent?
YouTube does a shit ton of A/B testing so they probably didn’t roll that change out to everyone yet. I currently don’t have any issues either but they will eventually hit us with that shit.
Also interested in how you can do this.
“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.
Or “Might as well do EVIL”, what is anybody going to do about it, maybe make some noise but we just pay off TACO and we good.
God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!
Just Americans?
Nestlé: I have done nothing wrong, ever, in my life.
The US government: I know that, and I love you
OTOH, Danone is a B corporation, so there are choices in that space.
American flavoured capitalism has poisoned the well.
