Blocking adblockers apparently doesn’t work well enough so google resorts to various forms of gaslighting (delayed video playback, api randomly returning wrong video, and now skipping video straight to the end).
Had the random API one the other day. Was nuts. Also the 5 second delay for Firefox too when it was a thing.
I thought I was going insane with the wrong video thing. I have premium but also an ad blocker because the entire internet is a cancerous cesspit without one, so I wonder if I get hit with anti ad blocking measures or I was just tripping?
Use Youtube frontends. Here is Privacy Guides’ page about Youtube frontends. All of Youtube’s BS will disappear.
It’s not mentioned there because it doesn’t meet the OSI definition, but Grayjay is a source-available Android app that pulls videos from various services (e.g. Nabula, Odysee, PeerTube, etc). I’m hopeful it’ll become properly open source at some point.
Oh no!
uBlock Origin updates
Anyway…
More and more Im trusting the fact that ublock origin will correct these issues in short order. Youtube must really hate those guys…
Youtube must really hate those guys…
Makes you wonder how long it will take, before Raymond Hill plummets to his death from a basement window.
More anticipating him getting sued out of existence Media Matters style, by vexatious filing in the Fifth Circuit.
They have been really good at it over the last few months.
While the developer doesn’t accept donations, they do encourage donating to the people maintaining the block lists. I’ve contributed in the past and would happily keep doing so.
It would be a shame if the devs maintaining the block lists stop doing what they’re doing because it’s not sustainable enough for them.
Why doesn’t the developer accept donations?
"I do not want the administrative workload that comes with donations. I do not want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for financial support. I want to be free to move on to something else if ever I get tired of working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).
Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. I can not emphasize this enough."
Not all heroes wear capes. Seriously, this man is now enshrined in my mental halls of great men along with John Bannister Goodenough, whom I just discovered died last year. I’m going to go be heartbroken now.
Interesting. Thanks.
I have been using Brave as my browser for years, I have never once seen an ad on YouTube. Nor have I ever had any of the issues that have been reported with people using ad blockers.
I’m using firefox + ublock origin and have never had the reported issues either.
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I’m leeching premium from a friend so no ads on pc, but because I’m getting sick and tired of all the shorts shit being pushed onto me (even play automatically when I would open the YouTube app) I’m using Grayjay on my phone instead of the official YouTube app. Never ads and it even has sponsor block. Plus you can follow creators instead of channels, across platforms. And downloading a video means you can actually watch it without a connection too. It has more perks then someone paying for premium has. Piracy pais off.
Shorts are the bane of my ADHD ass
I’m going to have to look into Greyjay for sure just for the no shorts part
Yeah I hear ya, same here. Fuck shorts.
Grayjay is from Louis Rossmann, one of the biggest advocates for right to repair. It costs 10 dollars, one time payment, but if you don’t pay it also works. It’s open source. If you have an issue and mail then, they actually respond (fast) to try to solve the issue, or make changes to the app to make it better. It’s really great what they do. And YouTube hates him.
TIL Louis Rossmann somehow more based than I believed
I picked up Grayjay so I can actually watch early access videos from creators I follow on Patreon. I honestly love how it seamlessly integrates multiple services around creators. Also supports Nebula, and IMO provides a nicer experience compared to the official app.
Personally I still use NewPipe (Tubular fork) for my daily viewing just because I kind of prefer that UI
Isn’t it only source available, and not open source, due to a restriction on reusing the code?
Louis said in the announcing video it’s open source, anyone is free to do with it what they want, even if they want to exclude the 10 dollar payment in it. He really doesn’t give a shit.
He did give a warning though:
“if you dare to put malware in it or any other malicious shit, I will hunt you down and destroy you.”
On android I use Revanced. It patches the official Youtube app (patches are open source) to greatly expand the base functionality and offer a lot more customization of the UI.
For me the best features are ad block, sponsorblock (skips in video sponsored segments), and complete excision of shorts from all aspects of the app.
It also works on Youtube Music, effectively allowing free premium (just don’t get the local downloads of your most listened tracks to help save data, but I have unlimited anyway).
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They get paid whether sponsored sections of the video are skipped or not though, which is the beauty of sponsorblock. Sometimes the sponsor sections are high effort though and worth watching.
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There aren’t many products being sponsored through YouTube creators which are actually worth it imo. I mean, the best VPN providers don’t pay loads of money for ads. Same with many other products. Companies focused on mass ad campaigns often have expensive products which are not that great. I did see some which are actually pretty good, but most of it is just average at best.
But I also have a personal hate towards ads in general. We are being overloaded with ads wherever you look. I try to live as ad free as possible. I think sponsorblock is awesome, because the creator still gets payed as no one can see you skipped the promotion part. I also don’t like self promotion parts either. I don’t like begging for likes and subscriptions. If the video is good, it gets a like. If the creator is good, I’ll follow. If it’s really good, I’ll consider patreon. Many of the best creators do not beg for likes and only slightly mention patreon at the outro.
I understand creators need to do it, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t like it so sponsorblock is perfect as creators can continue doing it while I can auto skip. Before I had sponsorblock I never clicked any of the links because of what I mentioned before, so me skipping the parts doesn’t change anything for the creator.
That’s fair, I hadn’t considered that people may actually want to click through on sponsored content to help the creator. I really enjoy not having to see another ad for the usual sponsored brands ever again though (raid, vpns etc) .
Also firefox + ublock, but for me, it literally makes YouTube unusable. As in videos just flat out will not play in any way. I just get an endlessly loading spinner for the video
I have had that happen a few on desktop if I left a video paused overnight, but refreshing the page sorted it out right away.
Sadly, refreshing doesn’t help me either. I’ve tried.
It sometimes happens for me as well
Usually I can get to the vid if I go to the channel and try again. Or trying again a little while later.
It’s fuckin annoying when it trips
Do you have uBlock Origin, or one of the fake adblockers that try to ride on its name?
I verified it and it is the genuine ublock origin
I have this problem or it will play for like 3 seconds and then buffer for a bit, play 3 seconds, buffer, repeat for infinity. No matter what I do I have one of these issues with Firefox and any adblocker and it’s super annoying.
I used to get that, but now I don’t even get that few seconds.
Try an extension to spoof your browser agent.
I set mine to spoof Chrome and my Firefox + ublock stopped having any issues with YouTube.
Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll give that a try!
This is the way.
Same, that combination never causes me any problems (I use uMatrix too which is always causing problems, but I get to decide which domains to allow cookies, scripts, and XHR requests from/to).
Don’t use brave, they’re shady. LibreWolf with uBlock Origin is plenty.
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I mean they did also inject affiliate links without the users noticing which is really shady behaviour from a browser because it has one job, open the link I click and nothing else. But that’s just IMHO if that is acceptable for you personally then there is no issue with that.
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You forgot the VPN service they install without consent.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925192/brave-browser-vpn-windows-11
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Brave appears to be changing this behavior in a future update, but there are still open questions.
Still waiting?
It’s not so much shady as 1) crypto BS incorporated into it and 2) the CEO is homophobic IIRC.
The “crypto BS” also encompasses running a protection racket whereby Brave man-in-the-middles website ads to replace them with its own, then shakes down the website owners to buy into said crypto BS if they want their lost revenue back.
That counts as shady in my book: an end-user has every right to control what their computer (their property) does, but the third-party interference for the third-party’s benefit crosses the line.
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I do turn off all the rewards and other BS in the browser, but I will look into Firefox and uBlock. Thank you.
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Any reason for picking it over all the other chromium browsers?
It blocks in line ads and trackers, that’s why I have been using it.
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Ungoogled chromium with some privacy extensions would probably be a similar experience.
Waterfox…
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Good. Every chromium-based browser is evil because it’s Chromium based and therefore helps enable Google’s disastrous web hegemony.
If you think Firefox’s lack of 100% compatibility with Google’s self-serving bullshit is a bug instead of a feature, you’re part of the problem.
Oh yeah. My bad.
Firefox with user agent switcher addon.
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WIth user agent switcher, you can use firefox for the sites that make you use chrome. Hasn’t failed me yet with the three sites I need to use that would not work on firefox without it.
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I’m confident its people using Chrome with Adblock Plus
I’ve had this issue where youtube is sort of breaking for me, but it shouldn’t matter because I very begrudgingly pay for Youtube Premium.
(I’m not extremely tech savvy to the point where it’s easy for me to set up a raspberry pi or whatever to watch youtube in bed on my tv OK?)
Anyways, sometimes it like, gets weird and the video player gets stuck at 0:00 and loops like 3 seconds of the video.
Pro top for premium: cancel sub, VPN into country like India turkey Ukraine etc, subscribe with credit card with no fx fees.
Enjoy 3usd per month rate
Assuming they’re not from one of those countries already
That was the assumption but the advice is for anyone who hates google enough but hates ads more or just wants to save money.
Just use an ad blocker that isn’t Ad Block Plus on Chrome and you’ll be able to go adless without sucking Google’s cock.
We responding to the guy who said he wants on teevee and doesn’t care to fuck with it.
Nah that will just ruin regional pricing for those that actually needs it.
Sadly, I checked and if you try to sign up with A VPN it cock blocks you and says “sowwy can’t vewivy yow cowntwy :(”
And you have to make a whole new youtube account just for it.
Sounds like a bug in the filters used by Adblock and Adblock Plus. Afaik uBO or Adguard aren’t affected.
YouTube will not stop until the site is Unusable by anyone without over paying for every second they are there. YouTube as a free site is doomed
If they push hard enough eventually there will be a replacement.
Federation could solve this. All you need is one flagship instance that doesn’t allow uploads, but it allows users to create accounts and playlists to act as “the” site for the federated network and then content creators can start their own instances.
I’ve been having this.
My videos are also randomly going from 4k to 360p, and having long hitches/pauses. Thats assuming the page loads at all, which may take a few refreshes…and its not an internet/connection related issue.
happening with Firefox with ublock origin.
edit Honestly, the youtube pages (and only the youtube pages) act slow and laggy like the CPU is running at 100% doing hard number crunching. yet system monitor shows its not even breaking 10% load on the CPU, and that firefox’s process isnt even using half that, so it feels like theres something artificially slowing the page down, in retrospect.
My videos are also randomly going from 4k to 360p, and having long hitches/pauses
I’m seeing this as well. Except I’m not using an adblocker on youtube, and I am paying for youtube premium…
I don’t think it’s entirely caused by youtube fighting adblockers. I think it’s more likely just a regular, boring, old fashioned fuck-up.
I am paying for youtube premium…
Oof.
I have my reasons. You may not agree, but you also don’t live in my house.
Haha that reminds me of a period of my life where I realized it was possible for game devs to detect piracy but instead of making the game say, “not legit copy, cannot play”, it would be more subtle and make itself unstable and eventually crash.
I had a pirated copy of RCT3 that would crash regularly after a few hours. Thought maybe that’s what was going on, plus it was a good game and worth my money anyways, so I bought a legit copy and installed that.
A few hours into playing, it crashed again.
Oh well, other than the crashing it was still a good game so I don’t regret buying it. And I think they sorted it out because my more recent plays didn’t see any crashes. I even bought it again on Steam since I’m not entirely sure where the disc is and don’t have a drive to read it anyways.
ive had it for over a week, though. Think it’d be fixed by then if it was a fuck up
Think it’d be fixed by then if it was a fuck up
Who knows. If it’s not impacting a signifigant percentage of viewers enough for them to complain it may not be a high priority yet.
Yup it just started doing it to me, AdBlock on firefox. whelp I’ll just download them… https://github.com/Unrud/video-downloader
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Thank you for that, I’ll have a look.
You can also just play them directly with MPV or VLC.
I just tried that and it’s not working for me. MPV just closes itself and VLC gives me an error message. Do I need to do more that just drag and drop the URL?
For VLC you need to go to Media > Open Network Stream (or Ctrl+N), then paste the youtube link there.
For MPV use command line
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videocodeVLC still gives me the same error message.
For MPV, it gives me the following error message:
`mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw [ytdl_hook] ERROR: [youtube] 3e9_l2oGxdw: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred Failed to recognize file format.
Exiting… (Errors when loading file) `
Your mpv or vlc versions may be too old. Try updating them to the latest versions.
Well, while MPV might be outdated, I already mentioned that I was able to get YouTube videos working by downloading a newer version of yt-dlp and creating a conf file for MPV that links to it. While I was looking into the problem, the versions available in apt for all three of these are outdated by at least a year, possible 3 years for MPV. I’m not sure if this is just a Linux Mint issue but I have noticed that a lot of the software both preinstalled and available in it’s repository, are pretty outdated.
I might try downloading the newer versions of these later. I got MPV working and that’s good enough for me right now.
Mint is known to use old software in its repositories as it’s based on Ubuntu LTS. The flatpak mpv should work though.
flatpak install flathub io.mpv.Mpvand then run it withflatpak run io.mpv.Mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQIf you don’t want to type
flatpak run io.mpv.Mpvall the time, you can create an alias in your~/.bashrcfile. For example:alias play='flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv'. (After editing your bashrc file, run:source ~/.bashrcto activate the change). Then you can run it withplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I got YouTube videos working in MPV. While I have no idea if the way I did it was technically not correct, all I did was download the newest version of yt-dlp from github and created a file name mpv.conf which links to the yt-dlp python file. I was also able to set a preferred resolution using that conf file.
That is way too much faff if you are watching youtube daily.
Get something like FreeTube, FOSS with all the ad blocking and sponsor blocking automatically enabled. And your subscriptions and other settings are all saved locally.
You can download YouTube videos via yt-dlp and add them to a jellyfin server. If you’d want to watch them without ads and off of Google.
Yeah but I don’t really want to keep the videos. Need one of these alternative sites to hurry up and take off
I’ve been looking into tube archivist actually. Want to get it set up soon and try it out.
Auto downloads, direct to Jellyfin, rules set up to delete them afterwards
I can recommend FreeTube, which is a standalone privacy friendly alternative that gets their videos directly from Google. While also blocking any ads, sponsorships and tracking.
An privacy alternative to Google would be wonderful, but in the meantime we can do it ourselves.
I’d imagine there would be a way to automatically delete the file if you’ve watched a certain percentage and it’s been a certain amount of time.
IDK, I’m not a programmer.
It would be pretty trivial to write a 1 line ‘script’ that deletes everything in the directory older than X hours.
Is this happening to any user in the EU?
Why?
I assume he’s asking because the EU has a bunch of laws that protects users from this kind of shitty behavior. When I went to the EU many of the apps I use became less shitty.
Does the EU actually have any laws that would prevent a company from doing whatever they want to try to fight ad blockers? I mean it would be really cool if they did, but I would be shocked if any government required a company not to try to prevent users from circumventing the way they make money.
I don’t know of any specific laws against them enshitifying adblockers. But there are things like the GDPR and in the EU big tech corporations are under constant scrutiny by regulators. Making them a lot less likely to do these kinds of shitty things in general. I assume that’s why she/he’s asking. Perhaps pressure from regulators has caused them to reframe from engaging in this same behavior in the EU? Out of caution?
Edit: I use the modified version of the Youtube app on iOS (uYou) and the skipping behavior happened to me and it reminded me to respond to your comment. I’m pretty sure they’re breaking adblockers on purpose.
Because EU has a track record of putting stop to shitty practices by major corporations.
Would not surprise me if they leave EU out of this just to prevent a potential conflict.
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This is what I do anyways because I am too impatient to watch through 15 minutes of blah blah to reach the end and hear, “in my next video I’ll actually show you how to dobthe thing that you came here to see.”
Give me a decent web page with searchable text and a few pictures (if needed) and I’ll be happy.
I was searching on YouTube for seat sizes for a long haul flight and can try to compare different airlines seats. There was so much annoying content that I went to Bing to search (Google is bad now).
That was also pretty bad. I ended up using chatGPT and gave me the answer in 1 minute.
But are you sure that answer wasn’t a hallucination?
When ChatGPT searches the web, it provides sources.
Ah, you used bing copilot to search. OK.
I used the actual ChatGPT. I don’t really like the copilot answers.
I’m not having that issue. I also use Freetube as a backup on desktop.
Im amazed at how good libretube is getting honestly
It is honestly great and the only hassle is manually getting your sub list.
I know that once adblockers won’t work anymore I will simply avoid YouTube.
Seems like it’s working as intended - have you seen the sponsor to content ratio on YouTube these days?
I actually haven’t. Any info on this? I’m curious to see which one is dropping faster.
I don’t have exact numbers, (just anecdotals) but SponsorBlock has some basic stats, and so far they’ve saved people over 3962 years worth of time. By dividing that by how many skips there are, (3,608,826,265) you get roughly 34.6452092 seconds. Per skipped segment, which videos often have multiple of.
This doesn’t include videos that are purely promotional sponsored videos disguised as content, (see modern LTT or RyanToyReviews) video content that would break the coherency of the video if skipped or actual non-video ads that are becoming more and more frequent.
SponsorBlock also has options to skip filler in videos, which is hit or miss since it’s all community submitted, but…
Just use front ends if you don’t care about interacting with the content. It has been a few years since I am used to using them and I dread being forced to go back to youtube again.
