UPDATE 2 It seems that starting today, uBlock Origin is working to combat this Youtube Block. Mine started working again! Lets all thank the devs of UBO for fighting this fight!
UPDATE So as new info comes out, I’ll be posting it here. It seems as if this Rollout Has Several Parts.
Part 1
You get a popup message over top of your video, blocking the screen:
- This is the first sign. If you see this popup AND are logged into a YouTube account, your account has been selected.
- At this stage you can likely close or block these messages with an adblocker.
Part 2
This message will change, indicating that you have 3 remaining videos to watch without ads.
Will insert photo once one has been found
- At this stage your adblocker will imminently stop working in 3 videos time.
- Personally using Firefox + uBlock Origin and tweaking filters and updates does not even fix it.
Part 3
None of the video loads now, everything looks blank.
- At this stage you must tred new ground to avoid ads. I have posted methods in the comments. If you want to bypass this end page, read down there.
End of Update
YouTube has started rolling out anti-adblock to users inside the United States, which means that they are preparing to roll this out to the entire country. Personally, I have been blocked already. I want to gauge how common this occurrence is.
I’ve started to just download videos with
yt-dlpafter grabbing links via Invidious. Using Invidious itself has become somewhat unreliable lately, and this way I don’t have to put up with buffering and can watch in good quality. Cut out the middle menI have to wonder if once the ad blocking gets fully rolled out if yt-dlp will also cease to work?
Good question. I’d hope not
MPV can directly play yt videos (it uses a built-in copy of yt-dlp afaik), and it’s very configurable. I always watch yt videos with it.
Sometimes it would be useful if it could use a proxy like piped or invidious, but those links don’t work
Ooh, I should try that! I already use mpv, so that’d streamline things a bit
Consider upping the cache for youtube. By default it is 2 minutes, which is mostly fine, except that if you are speeding through a part with 2x or faster, you may quickly run out of that small cache, because it only loads with the speed of something between 1x and 2x.
And then you may also set up saving the cache to disk instead of RAM, because it may be quite larger. Single config option.
You can make these only apply for youtube videos only with conditional auto profiles. The doc has an example for an automatic youtube profile, it’s perfect.
I don’t use the main YouTube website at all anymore. A big reason for this is that I spend a lot of time using a really weak laptop that tends to struggle with the JavaScript-laden abomination that is modern corporate web design. Firefox itself struggles as well, so I primarily use Luakit with Invidious, which runs peachy. I also put together a local html page for my bookmarks that is generated from Yaml using a small C application (which is not optimal, I know, but I’ve been learning C and this was a good opportunity). Whenever something doesn’t work in Luakit, I evade to Palemoon. I also tried watching YouTube via mpv earlier, and it’s great! It runs infinitely better than any web player at max resolution and buffers the whole video. Never going back.
I meant too increase the cache for yt videos in mpv :)
But you say it buffers the whole video, so maybe already changed something to do that
But yeah, I agree on your other points. If youtube blocks yt-dlp, mpv and proxies, then I’m done with it.
Do you self host Invidious? I have zero issues with it self hosted.