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Comment by notkaiho | Hacker News Reader

Pi-Hole has made my home browsing experience so much better since setting it up. Minimal resource overhead, maximum results - and if you care about stats those are available too but I just turned all logging off.

Now if it could just filter out YouTube ads...

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I had something working a while ago for YT ad blocking in chromecast; the underlying problem there is that the chromecast is hard-coded to use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8, etc) instead of your networks. So you need to set up your network to intercept DNS requests to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and instead send these to your own ad-blocked DNS server. My network setup no longer lets me do this, and I don't care enough to make it work.

Just pay for YT premium if you don't want ads (to all those people complaining about wanting an option to pay and not be tracked/advertised to/etc - this is a great opporunity to put your money where your mouth is)

Just don’t allow outbound DNS except from your pihole, and the Chromecast will use whatever DNS server you give it.

Also, make sure to block UDP and TCP on port 53, as well as UDP on port 443 (Chrome snitching).

I imagine at some point, Chromecast will start using DNS-over-HTTPS and move the goalposts elsewhere.

AdGuard DNS works well for YouTube ads IME. https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

I’m pretty sure that the on-device app blocks youtube ads, not the DNS filtering.

Although I think it is indeed possible to block youtube ads through DNS filtering, it’s just really difficult & only works temporarily before needing to block new domains.

I actually looked into this a bit after posting that comment, since it occurred to me that I don't actually know exactly what's blocking YouTube ads for me. (I'm still not sure, which is why I didn't edit my previous comment after doing that research.)

Empirically, I don't get YouTube ads in the iOS app. I do use Firefox Focus as a content blocker, in addition to AdGuard DNS. I don't use the AdGuard app, and it was my understanding that Firefox Focus only blocked ads in Safari, so I assumed it was AdGuard DNS. The documentation for AdGuard DNS seems to indicate that it shouldn't work for this, but it seems like either that documentation or the documentation for iOS content blockers is missing something. Unless YouTube has just decided not to serve me ads for some reason. (I'm not complaining either way.)

> Now if it could just filter out YouTube ads...

Ive heard that the problem is that the native YT apps come with a big list of IP addresses for the ad servers, instead of doing lookups.

If true, it would be pretty easy to grab those ip addresses from the binary and add them to a firewall.

A firewall is a little more than what I would trust to a raspberry pie, though...

I thought it was streaming the ads right along with the main content making it impossible to block.

If you're on Android, you can use the YT site instead of the app and Firefox with uBlock Origin will block the ads.

> vanced.app

I'd rather recommend this one:

https://newpipe.schabi.org/

At least it is opensource and works great.

it broke down for me after 10min of use. no amount of reinstall or cleaning cache helped.

it has frail feet but it does work more often than not

Interestingly it's been working perfectly for me with no issues for almost 1 year. A bit surprised to learn that it is not stable for a bunch of people.

Well I think it's just a matter of lag between bugfix and updates on my side. Which means from time to time I get a guru error. Other than that it's quite stable.

Maybe coincidentally after the 10 minutes YouTube changed something? Once or twice NewPipe stopped working for me suddenly but an update helped. BTW F-Droid gets updates of NewPipe a bit later than GitHub it seems.

I used NewPipe for a while and it was very nice, enjoyed how well it works. However I started wanting to see videos on my TV (Chromecast), and that's where the abilities of NewPipe fell short.

They have an open issue [0] since a couple years ago, but so far it is not a feature yet.

[0]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/668

Ditto. Exact same experience. It is great for what it is.

For me on top of that, my wife and I often join chromecast together, and she has an iPhone. Vanced is pretty much fully compatible with the official YouTube app.

They very recently moved to require an special additional app just for installing their new .apks file (which is a file containing multiple .apk inside), called SAI.

That would be fine by me, if it wasn't because SAI requires Android 5.0, while my Nvidia Tegra -like tablet (Xiaomi MiPad 1) is stuck on Android 4.4 :-(

(no, Lineage and friends is not a good replacement, they all break the camera, and yet worse, suck battery like crazy)

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