Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
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?
Also interested in how you can do this.
So here’s what happened recently:
- I opened the Google News widget on my Android phone, saw a Sponsored link, and found it interesting
- Clicked on it, the link opened in Chrome, opening the googleadservices redirection thingummy
- Took over 5 seconds to process the redirect
- I exited the browser
Guess who missed ad money?
But of course, maybe they got the ad money and the only losers were:
- me, who didn’t get to see the website that might actually have had something I wanted
- the website owner, who not only didn’t get my business but also had to pay Google, because Google most probably processed the ad first and didn’t care to process the redirect
I feel like I understand why they removed the “Do no evil” sign. Because now, they are messing with both, the product and the customers, only providing as much as is required to take their money, instead of the full, advertised service.
“Is your video not loading ? Check out why, you fucking ad dodging commie” is the feeling i got from youtube’s newest message while my video was unexpectedly taking 10s to load
They cannot kill Adblocks, because if they would — a lot of html5 embedded YouTube videos would be coming worthless and so would youtube (discord for example)
As much as I hate dealing with their shenanigans, I can’t really blame them either. As long as I can get away with using an adblocker, I will - but honestly, YouTube gives me more value for free than a lot of services I actually pay for. I have no moral argument for why YouTube should let me watch videos for free, even though I like free stuff just as much as the next guy.
YouTube gives me more value for free than a lot of services I actually pay for
That’s the really annoying part.
I’ve been considering swapping to other services for a long time, but to follow the creators I want to follow I’d have to subscribe to Nebula and Floatplane and I’d still miss out on quite a few creators.
I did not always use an ad blocker. Frankly my stance is they’ve made their bed, now they get to lie down in it. If it wasn’t for YouTubes ad quality being so poor I would have never bothered taking the 30 seconds it takes to install an adblock those 10 or so years ago
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I’ll do that before watching an ad.
Grayjay :)
YT’s blocked on it. Fuck you, Google.
https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/issues/2351
If Google’s going to be further tightening YT to the degree where they might roll out DRM platform-wide as opposed to just limiting it to movies on the platform, I’m about to seriously start looking for stuff to watch on PeerTube because YT is not long for the world and will probably start pushing away anything that isn’t AI slop at some point in terms of content.
Bless you.
Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn’t this old news? Or “olds” as it were?
It was previously a “thread.sleep(5000)” in the client code IIRC.
It was reported a decent amoint of time ago and i thought i felt a difference…turned out my isp was sending air bubbles through the internet cable.
After the internet stabilized i noticed exactly zero, just an occasional “restart browser because video’s stopped playing alltogether”
Yep, for me it ha been “fixed” for about a week now.
I’ve been dealing with this forever.
Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:
If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.
In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.
Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.
The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.
Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.
I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.
Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.
Is google’s company motto still ‘Don’t be evil’?
They removed that from their official code of conduct in 2018.
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
I love how you’re just doing your bit lol
Great idea. Eventually, and if enough ask, it could be a thing.
I’d sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Too true
Truth
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
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.
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.
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.
Nah. How would you crack down a program that just play the videos in the background and then just capture the content while it’s played?
Just queue up a bunch of vidoe you wanna watch, and let the program just essentially screen record it.
Well if you say “DRM”? Well we could share it to a display that itself is hacked and record all the signals.
Unless they are doing proctoring as if it were a test, there will always be some way to circumvent it.
Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
I’m so used to the sponsorship thing that I just instinctively tap/click the right side of the screen a few times to skip it.
(As for why I don’t use sponsorblock: I don’t block them because I wanna take a few seconds to take a peak into the sponsor segment to make sure they don’t have very evil sponsors like ahem “Betterhelp” (I don’t trust someone that still have that as a sponsor in 2025)
Edit: Also, I’m pretry sure someone will build a locally run AI model that can detect the ads/buffering and cut it out. “AI” might not give you true information in terms of search results, but pattern recognition is like its main job, right?
Imagine adblock re-rencoding software that picks mp4s clean based on repeated content(ads). The user could select each ad as they happen, mark them as such and let it identify them from there. Imagine sharable or federated caches of these ad records between users.
Someone who can code, please, imagine it.
What they should be imagining instead is a better video sharing platform. There are alternatives already…
Cause all you need is your imagination!
And billions of dollars to build and run the site with servers worldwide. No biggie
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.
They aren’t fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
it’s not hard to do it yourself either
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
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.
Me too. I’m up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
I’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.
I mean, you don’t need anything; it’ll work with no flags. I have these:
$ cat ~/.config/yt-dlp/config --embed-subs --embed-metadata --embed-chapters --embed-thumbnail --sponsorblock-mark=all $That’ll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
Note that subtitles doesn’t include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --write-auto-subs in conjunction
Thanks.
EDIT: There isn’t an
--embed-auto-subs, but there is a--write-auto-subs.Fixed thanks.
I like https://github.com/ArabCoders/ytptube gui. Only started using it yesterday, so far for indovidual videos. However it looks like it can also watch new videos being uploaded, thought not tried it myself.
Use docker compose for quick deployment
I’m a filthy Windows user that’s too lazy to migrate my main PC to Fedora.
> Path\to\yt-dlp.exe -P <target directory> <URL>Multiple URLs can be separated by spaces. Put any URLs with ampersands in quotes or remove the ampersand and following arguments.
You can find a list of all the arguments on the yt-dlp github page
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