You can use piped.

https://github.com/TeamPiped/documentation/blob/main/content...

Too unreliable. I just use yt-dlp and throw it on VLC on my iPad with airdrop.

If it's not worth that effort it probably wasn't worth watching anyway.

I appreciate it isn't brilliant. I use it as a fallback.

There will be a time when computing is so cheap that ads will be injected to the stream in such a way that it is impossible to remove them without real-time AI detector that indentifies the parts where ads are.

The problem Youtube has is that it wants to make sure you can't skip the ad, so it has to signal in some way to its front end and app that this segment is an ad. That mechanism can and will be used to skip it with other clients. They can put the ads in band of the video stream like twitch does but if they are genuinely indistinguishable then they are also fast forward and skippable.

TYT has to mark the ad segment, they are required by law to do it. And no matter how they try to obfuscate it, their own webpage must be able to extract that info, and present it to user. So it is pointless to integrate ads if you are going to provide the timestamps to skip.

Just look how Facebook does it, there is no "Sponsored post" anywhere in HTML, the literally place entire alphabet multiple times, each letter in separate span/paragraph tag, and then use CSS to actually style that into a message of their choice. All of that work just to prevent simple adblocking rules to work.

If they're injecting targeted ads in the stream, then the stream producer must be 'smart'. It's not much of a stretch for it to enforce playing out the segments at approximately realtime (or whatever speedup they want to allow), and to force the advert segments to play out before anything past them. Some sidechannel could be used to inform the client about what's going on and produce a sensible playhead position.

It seems inevitable that this is the end game, and I don't really see viable ways around it for realtime playback. For offline playback, yeah, presumably that sidechannel includes enough information to cut out the ads.

Already use sponsor block to stop the meat flavoured AI promoting shitty VPNs in the middle of their streams.

By then we will have real-time AI detectors to identify and remove ads. Begun, the LLM ad wars have.

Laws of thermodynamics suggest it will be easier for ad companies to find a way to spam you, than for you to bypass all of their ads. These real-time AI detectors cannot be very cheap to run/train.

If a human can tell what content is an ad (which is also required to be disclosed by the platform anyway), then an AI should be able to detect it fairly easily too.

They have a financial incentive to bypass our LLM ad-blockers but visual recognition is a fairly milquetoast function for LLMs even today. They will attempt to present ads in an unusual way to fool the models; the models will get updated; they will change their tactics again. It's the same cat and mouse game we play today but fought with LLM models instead. I'm confident we win such a fight.

Sponsor Block add-on works well for this, but entirely dependent on ads being at fixed time in the video.

Future versions could id the start and end frames of the ad and thus be able to detect the segment anywhere in the video.

Refreshing works for me, for now at least.

What ads? I run the equivalent of pihole, and use a Samsung TV user agent on YouTube.com/tv and I never see ads, except for an occasional banner on the home tab.

Pihole isn't, and hasn't been able to block youtube ads for several years now, so if you aren't seeing ads its something else stopping them. Ads are served from the same dns address as videos, so a dns block is incredibly poor for youtube.

I think it's time for creative solutions on this front. This plugin business is a little like a cop living in a house of thieves.

For instance, how about an app that will basically detect an ad and visually overlay a blank blob over the ad video (and of course mute, or even just transmute, the audio).

We'd still pay that tax in terms of time, having to sit through those 30-60 seconds, but it's way better than also surrendering your mind to the utter intrusion.

>Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them.

Subscribe to Premium, and the Google ads are gone. I think it's only fair, given how vast and complex YouTube is as a service.

There was a headline here the other day that Youtube Premium Lite will now have more ads.

Eventually Premium will have ads too. It’s just a matter of time.

I don't think I can solve these problems that far ahead. Currently, and for some good years now, YT Premium has not had any Google ads. I think subscribing to it it's presently a good value, and that's about it. We are free to cancel our subscription and do whatever adblocking we can when the ads eventually come.

I feel the outrage against the free YT, the free Spotify, and probably other services is misplaced, since these providers offer fair subscription prices that make the UX completely normal. I don't see why we, as users, should fight this. This fight could be allocated to actually pressing issues, or used as energy to give to the content itself that we get from these services.

But I guess this is something that is up to each individual.

> I feel the outrage against the free YT, the free Spotify, and probably other services is misplaced

No, it's not misplaced.

- https://consumerrights.wiki/YouTube

- https://consumerrights.wiki/Spotify

Nice lists!

But the outrage here is not about these, but about how "Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them.", them being ad blockers.

One can decide that "okay, if you're not nice to me, I won't be nice to you as well". And that's fair. But then, the complaints of one party giving more hurt to the other doesn't make sense - they were in a fight to begin with. Then it's the name of the game. Ad blocking is a cat and mouse game in the first place, so if it looks like that the cat upgrades, so should the mouse.

Or, make all of this headache go away with YT Premium.

No, many of the problems listed in the wiki remains true whether or not you're on a paid plan. It's beyond absurd to spin them into an ad for YT Premium. Some of the problems are specifically about screwing over paid users, like this one:

> The YouTube Mobile app allows you to download videos for offline consumption if you have a YouTube Premium subscription. However, the app's DRM prevents you from watching downloaded videos, unless the app has "phoned home" in the last 48 hours. This caveat is not clearly disclosed on the main YouTube Premium page, instead requiring the user to navigate support articles to discover this limitation.

Imagine the disappointment of users who thought that "offline" meant "not online" instead of some Googlespeak nonsense, paid for YT Premium before going on a trip to a place with poor internet connection, only to find out that the video won't actually play. It's a trip ruined and money wasted.

YT Premium doesn't make the "headache go away," it just adds more.

That's a good point, that's actually bad service!

You’re right that you can always cancel your subscription.

Personally it just feels kinda like buying time, so I’d rather have a more permanent solution.

The enshittification seems inevitable.

Yes to all points, and the subscription still makes sense. Why not make your life easier and less cognitively burdened for a few meager dollars per month? And then re-think the plan when you are uncomfortable with it in the future.

I understand the yearn for stability, but it's futile. With services, there is no permanence, and so it's unreasonable to expect such. Even the very legal and social structure that underpins it all is constantly shifting. I suggest a hybrid solution: really take part in systems that you find worthwhile, like YouTube. Pay for it so that you can feel you did your part. And take care of yourself with a plan B, in case plan A betrays you. For example, keep a public playlist with the videos you really don't want to lose, and sync them to your hard drive from time to time with yt-dlp.

Subscribe to Premium and pay ever-increasing prices [1][2][3] so that Google can track you better with you always being logged into an account with payment information attached. While still being exposed to ads for VPNs, cryptocurrency, scams [4], and more.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626035

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807803

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33279998

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054

Also sign yourself up for googles database of ‘people who will actually pay money if we annoy them enough’ meaning you’ll be a target demographic for future premium services

What exactly is the risk in that?

You need an explanation for why people don't want to be extorted?

Yes, please. I need explanation why "you’ll be a target demographic for future premium services" is a threat to any Premium subscriber in any way.

Because google sell more than just YouTube premium.

But what is the risk? What is the potential downfall, that I am helping with the Premium subscription?

- they start using per-person pricing or continually increase the cost now that they know a nag > purchase workflow works

- that they start applying per-person based costs to other searches (just because gmail is free for me, maybe your account has ‘reached a maximum usage’ and now you must pay, or they just drop storage limits of free to 500kb)

- that they plug that data into their analytics platform and sell the information that you personally will purchase services if nagged enough

Should I continue?

To add, I think the biggest difference here is google is actively engineering detection mechanisms for ublock, and then nagging users who use ublock, most of the people who use ublock probably wouldn’t pay for premium. I’d sooner pay for floatplane than do that.

I get your concerns, but I see it in a different way. I think we are at risk either way.

I think when people are actually vulnerable is when they are using an account-based service, for free. In your example, Gmail. If Google is being a bitch about my Premium service, I will just not pay it, and move on with my life. What does someone do when Google is being a bitch to them with Gmail? Do they change their email at all 100 places they have given their email to, just to resist a small monthly subscription for example, or ads or whatever? So if talking about risk, I'd rather look there.

Wrt ublock, similar deal. They would do that anyways. It's just unimaginable that such a power position as Google's wouldn't get abused.

Bottom line, I don't see how it's a bad thing paying them when they actually offer a paid service. I rather wish that these venture capital magic money free services would go away instead. Services should have a cost, and users should pay those costs as directly as possible. The weird things happen from all the indirections providers employ.

Yes, subscribe to Premium, and pay the reasonable price for the use of a service. Tracking? There is hardly any service that doesn't track its own usage. And whatever VPNs, crypto and scams the content creators peddle is up to the viewer. I barely get VPNs, and no crypto and no scams.

This should be pretty obvious, but Google isn't merely tracking its own usage. Its sole purpose is to digitally surveil you 24/7 and use the obtained information to manipulate you. By subscribing to Premium, you make that job easier for them than when you browse the web without signing in to YouTube, and by extension, Google.

> And whatever VPNs, crypto and scams the content creators peddle is up to the viewer. I barely get VPNs, and no crypto and no scams.

Come on, let's not resort to baseless shaming and blame shifting. The whole point of Premium is supposed to be about getting rid of ads. It demonstrably doesn't do that, making Premium a charity for the richest company in the world. It's 100% on Google for failing to provide any value with Premium.

I think several things are mixed up here.

>By subscribing to Premium, you make that job easier for them than when you browse the web without signing in to YouTube, and by extension, Google.

That has nothing to do with paying for YouTube Premium, but rather, with having signed in with the browser into the Google account, and using that to browse the internet as well. There are many cases where this doesn't happen. For example, if the user logs in on their phone, or smart tv, or uses separate browsers or Firefox Containers or such on PC. Also, google tracks without logging in at all, via Analytics, and by other means as well. Premium is the least of the concern here.

>Come on, let's not resort to baseless shaming and blame shifting.

Nah, you come on. Those ads were embedded in the video stream by the content creator, were they not? The onus is entirely on the uploader.

YT Premium is not charity, but a rather cheap subscription to a great service. It makes the Google ads go away, and with that, lifts a mental burden, because advertising is often plain evil.