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Comment by sydthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone noticed 2-3 ads per YouTube video (especially midstream)? It’s getting ridiculous.

There’s got to be a stop to this madness.

On an Android phone you can use NewPipe app from FDroid repository, it gives you YT without ads (and you can use it in background for free too)

It also has this amazing "skip silences" feature.

You can do background play in Safari iOS by switching to desktop mode, press play, lock the phone and then click again to play from lock screen / outside safari. Alternatively friendly does also background play.

This is tangentially related, but Google has been blocking iOS native PiP mode on YouTube on iPhones on the website.

Here's a bookmarklet (you must create and edit an existing bookmark with the contents below, else you will get an error) that will pop out a YouTube video on iOS into a PiP video when run. Simply click on the Bookmarks while on the YouTube page and select it.

This allows you to play the videos in the background by swiping the PiP player off to the side.

Disclaimer I do not remember where I got it, only that it seems to work for me.

javascript:(function()%7Blet%20v%20%3D%20document.querySelector('video')%3Bv.addEventListener('webkitpresentationmodechanged'%2C%20(e)%3D%3Ee.stopPropagation()%2C%20true)%3BsetTimeout(()%3D%3Ev.webkitSetPresentationMode('picture-in-picture')%2C%203000)%3Bcompletion()%7D)()

How does Google manage to block iOS PiP and why doesn’t Apple write some workaround in its Safari engine?

just a heads up:

They have their own repository [0] which has faster updates.

[0]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/

On an Android phone you can use firefox, ublock origin and youtube in the browser, too. It also supports playing in a floating window (fullscreen the video and then switch app from firefox to something else).

I noticed this is starting to be less effective. Now and then an ad creeps through the protection barrier. First time it happened to me was exactly at the moment I was demonstrating someone that I really do have an ad-free internet experience :/

i'm using vanced and it works really great, the only ads that i rarely see are the "recommended promoted video"

Vanced is also really good. Supports YT Music too.

Is there any App that can do the same on Smart TV? Getting tired of ads on Youtube's ads.

As per the Sponsorblock extensions Github page only App for Android based Smart TVs with sponsorblock buitin appears to be Smart Tube Next [0]

[0] : https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext/

I use https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartYouTubeTV

It ah the same UI as youtube, but no ads.

There's also Youtube Vanced.

It has an adblocker but also SponsorBlock, which is amazing. It skips all the annoying tedium of YouTube videos (intro, self promotion, sponsors, credits)

I couldn't go back to Youtube without adblock and SponsorBlock.

Yes. The answer is to use Patreon and sponsorships for the most part to guarantee an income as opposed to the fidgety monetisation on YT, and to use an adblocker like uBlock Origin to get rid of the YT ads.

On Android, check out https://vancedapp.com/. On iOS, the largest similar jailbreak project just shut down due to being bullied. Good work, jerks.

Yeah it's called YouTube Premium. Think like a Netflix subscription but for YouTube. Google probably A/B tested different versions of YouTube to see which one generated more YouTube Premium subscribers. It turns out that the higher $$$-generating code (i.e. driving Premium subscriptions) is the one that bypasses Safari's adblocking engine.

Is there guaranteed no ads with Premium or do they still put ads in there? I mean some streaming services and of course the old paid cable TV did.

No ads at all. Now, wanna know what antitrust means? It means changing your YouTube policy so that instead of competing with just some random hobo PeerTube, they now compete in the same space as Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime. It means an entrant to compete with YouTube must now be a mega corporation.

Of course all above is just my opinion.

Guaranteed no ads injected by YT, but don't forget that already most popular YT content includes ads inside the video, as a small bit of informercial style content somewhere in the middle of the video.

I remember when cable TV used to be like that...

At least you can scrub past those for now

On desktop there's the SponsorBlock extension, which skips them using a crowdsourced list of timestamps.

https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

Why aren't you using an ad-blocker?

Nothing works on Safari

Then you must like Safari more than you despise ads.

There is no alternative on ios. I choose not to watch videos on mobile over using android.

I'm using Brave on iOS as we speak...

Brave on iOS is just a wrapper over Safari's WebKit and JavaScript runtime. Apple bans all competing rendering and JavaScript implementations from the App Store, forcing browser developers to develop skins over Safari.

That's ... absolutely tragic and rage-inducing!

Then you must like iOS more than you despise ads.

Why the downvote? Isn't it a logical conclusion?

This is why I pretty much stopped using mobile internet on my phone outside of looking up stuff on maps or maybe wikipedia. The mobile web is unusable now on iOS. I have a ~5 inch long screen, most websites give me an inch of readable space between the banner ad and the massive autoplaying video ad consuming the bottom of the screen, and the footer ad. All of them have the tiniest close button imaginable, even using my index finger can lead to fat fingering it and clicking some ad that instantly takes me to some entirely unrelated app on the app store instantly, or fakes a popup notification that my device is compromised. Even if I do manage to successfully hit close, another ad pops up in that space a few seconds later. Its like the internet before ad blockers in the early 2000s, full of malware in the ads.

Perhaps some alternative front-end for youtube might be useful to you - for example invidious. It has no ads and has several other improvements over official youtube front-end.

That just isn’t true. Here’s one example: https://crystalapp.co/ and: https://better.fyi/

I use both on iOS Safari.

Also Wipr and 1Blocker on Mac as well as Purify on iOS.

That was absolutely predictable. Just my own anectodal evidence: through my life, ads always became more present, never less. No matter if i.e. ad-financed TV (they started with a single block of 4-5 ads in the late 80s in a standard 90 minute film) to sports (just check a video of a soccer game of the 80s to the how much white space was left on their shirts) the internet etc.

Well, they do become less present once the viewers tire and change medium. So the cycle repeats.

For $15/mo I don't see any YouTube ads

Also works as opposed to donating to individual Patreons and such. I still don't like a cut being taken by YT because I disagree with their business practices though. Sponsorships are the future of online media creation, I guess.

The YT ads are obviously dealt with through an adblocker.

Aha disagree with business practices, but happy to use their infrastructure to consume content, and still complaining about watching ads - ok

Yes, exactly. They don't make you pay for it, they offer it for free. So I choose not to pay for it. Besides I don't complain about their ads, I simply don't watch them.

YouTube Premium is only $12/month. People act like it’s crazy to spend the price of an appetizer on an entertainment platform that they use tens of hours a month.

12USD is out of reach in many countries.

They adapt pricing, just like steam, spotify and others. I live in russia and only pay 4USD for the family plan

Unfortunately many, many YT creators have started including advertising directly in their videos, so even YT premium is not literally ad-free.

No. Because I run ublock origin.

And SponsorBlock. Because I don't care who is disrupting the genital shaving wallet repair toolkit.

If watching on desktop get adblock/unlock origin. I recall Google has a setting to stop personalised ads or clearing my preferences or profile or something, anecdotally I feel I see less ads on my TV. I also try to avoid watching YouTube on my TV, dns level ad blocking doesn't work

I made fuckOff.yt to make people feel better about this. Ublock or pihole are better solutions though

FWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....

Get yourself a Nvidia shield. It has no advertisement build in and even can turn on and off the host TV. Also, I would advise you to disconnect your smart TV entirely.

I just have an RPi 4. The protocol that can turn off and on the tv there is just called CEC and you can make simple scripts with cec-client to trigger it. (Kodi also already uses it.)

Interesting, I had not seen this.

I have an Nvidia Shield, and ran PiHole for a bit. It didn't block youtube ads for me, but might be regional ranges not being blocked. Eventually I stopped using PiHole since it broke some payment processors at times, and there was no easy way for family members to temp disable it and it became unmanagable.

Loved the concept though.

Connect your own media center. I use an RPi 4. It can play netflix and youtube in Kodi, for example. Admittedly there are many minor compat issues, of course.

Yup, will check this out thanks

I should look up the local TV advertising rules, I'm fairly confident it's not allowed to have five 6-15 second ads interrupting a ten minute program.

edit: apparently up to 20% of time can be spent on ads (12 minutes per hour), can't find anything about frequency though.

I'm getting 3 ads for short (3 minutes) videos, and a dozen for 1 hour videos. Last time before I ditched the Youtube app, many of the ads can't be skipped and some of them were actually two successive ads.

And for some reason, I can't pay for Youtube from my country.

There is - pay money.

The pretend it's not TV, they make into TV, and then everyone who wasn't in Idiocracy leaves.

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