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Comment by sherr | Hacker News Reader

Thank you Raymond and all others involved with uBlock Origin. It makes the internet bearable for me and other family members.

Every time I use the "YouTube" app on my elderly relatives TV and see how often it is interrupted with adverts I count my blessings that this add-on exists.

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PSA: If it's a recent-ish LG TV, you can root it and install an ad-free youtube app in just a few clicks. That said, one might be afraid of potential future breakage/maintenance burden from installing homebrew software for a relative.

https://rootmy.tv/

https://repo.webosbrew.org/apps/youtube.leanback.v4

Wow, I had no idea! Thanks for the tip I have some reading to do.

On Android TV there's SmartTubeNext that I've installed without root access. It's such a joy to use. It's honestly better than the official Youtube app (it handles multi accounts properly) and even embeds SponsorBlock by default! And it doesn't show the comments, which is another feature as far as I'm concerned.

I installed SmartTubeNext last week and it feels like a burden has been lifted from my everyday life. There's genuinely not enough praise that can be given for it; it's arguably the perfect YouTube app for your TV.

It also supports logging in multiple accounts and remote play. Thank you for mentioning this!

At the moment, SmartTubeNext is the only reason I use my Shield on my LG TV, as the WebOS apps do everything else I need. But SponsorBlock is the best thing ever.

As I'm just about to start shopping for TVs, like LG generally and would love it if I could root it, you know if there is any list of compatible models somewhere? I did some browsing and could only find which webOS versions that are vulnerable, but not which LG model runs what version ("out of factory" version at the very least).

If you buy any retail model today, it will be compatible.

Great, thanks for the reply!

Yeah, I've done this on my LG C9, works awesome.

Apart from SponsorBlock in YT, the most useful thing I've found is the Hyperion sender app. I'm really looking forward to building my DIY Ambilight when the pieces arrive, and it's really nice to automatically capture all output, instead of capturing through HDMI.

SponsorBlock is awesome. I just wish it could automatically “detect” those sections without users input. Something like a neural network to detect if a section is sponsorship.

Woah I did not know that was a thing. I am now for sure going to build my own Ambilight

Good luck! I've ordered a SK6812 RGBW strip and a QuinLED Dig Uno v3, those were the best components from my research.

Can you load custom OS images onto them, or is this the same situation as with bootloaders on most Android devices?

Not that I'd want it actively connecting to the Internet either way, but if I could run something more stripped-down than an OEM stock image it would... almost make a smart TV attractive?

I mean, YouTube at least offers a subscription that makes the ads go away. Which is not the case with the cesspool that's the rest of the internet basically. It's such a privilege that a software like this exists, and is offered for free with no strings attached.

yes, this. but this practice is less common than i would have assumed at first.

there are websites out there that even after paying their subscription they still put up ads.

Hulu charges money and still interrupts shows with ads. Cable television ended up that way eventually too, despite one of the original selling points being the lack of ads. They always keep trying to take more.

Youtube still put up sponsored ads unfortunately, even if premium

The problem is YouTubers still get sponsored and advertise within the video. I would not want to pay for YouTube Premium and still get exposed to those ads.

Sponsor block extension. It's ad blocking extensions the whole way down.

FTC said that creators and influencers on social media services need to put "sponsored", "promoted" or "ad" tag disclosure on brands they are endorsing so it would be possibly for someone to make uBlock Origin filter which blocks such content.

The sponsor block extension is crowd funded, people put where the sponsor message is and it automatically skips it. Not sure if ublock can seek inside a youtube video.

>Not sure if ublock can seek inside a youtube video.

I was referring to a hashtag or simply a tag a piece of text that can be spotted and then that type of content skipped.

In videos with sponsors, YouTube adds a small notice when the video starts that says the video has sponsored content. It doesn't tell you where/when.

For example take a look at this sponsored video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcWQO57bGk

YouTube adds an overlay* in the upper left corner which says "Includes paid promotion". The overlay leads to https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10588440

Also creator added "#sponosred" hashtag.

Both "Includes paid promotion" overlay* and "#sponsored" hashtag can be detected and therefore the video could've been skipped or hidden by some extension or by uBlock Origin filter. You can either rely on detecting aforementioned Google overlay* or sponsored hashtag.

*HTML code of "Includes paid promotion" overlay:

<div class="ytp-paid-content-overlay" aria-live="assertive" aria-atomic="true" data-layer="4"><a class="ytp-paid-content-overlay-link" target="_blank" style="display: none;" href="https://support.google.com/youtube?p=ppp&nohelpkit=1"><d... class="ytp-paid-content-overlay-icon"><svg fill="none" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="100%"><path d="M6 9H5V5V4H6H19V5H6V9ZM21.72 16.04C21.56 16.8 21.15 17.5 20.55 18.05C20.47 18.13 18.42 20.01 14.03 20.01C13.85 20.01 13.67 20.01 13.48 20C11.3 19.92 8.51 19.23 5.4 18H2V10H5H6H7V6H21V13H16.72C16.37 13.59 15.74 14 15 14H12.7C13.01 14.46 13.56 15 14.5 15H15.02C16.07 15 17.1 14.64 17.92 13.98C18.82 13.26 20.03 13.22 20.91 13.84C21.58 14.32 21.9 15.19 21.72 16.04ZM15 10C15 9.45 14.55 9 14 9C13.45 9 13 9.45 13 10H15ZM20 11C19.45 11 19 11.45 19 12H20V11ZM19 7C19 7.55 19.45 8 20 8V7H19ZM8 8C8.55 8 9 7.55 9 7H8V8ZM8 10H12C12 8.9 12.9 8 14 8C15.1 8 16 8.9 16 10V10.28C16.59 10.63 17 11.26 17 12H18C18 10.9 18.9 10 20 10V9C18.9 9 18 8.1 18 7H10C10 8.1 9.1 9 8 9V10ZM5 13.5V11H3V17H5V13.5ZM20.33 14.66C19.81 14.29 19.1 14.31 18.6 14.71C17.55 15.56 16.29 16 15.02 16H14.5C12.62 16 11.67 14.46 11.43 13.64L11.24 13H15C15.55 13 16 12.55 16 12C16 11.45 15.55 11 15 11H6V13.5V17.16C8.9 18.29 11.5 18.93 13.52 19C17.85 19.15 19.85 17.34 19.87 17.32C20.33 16.9 20.62 16.4 20.74 15.84C20.84 15.37 20.68 14.91 20.33 14.66Z" fill="white"></path></svg></div><div class="ytp-paid-content-overlay-text">Includes paid promotion</div><div class="ytp-paid-content-overlay-chevron"><svg height="100%" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 32 32" width="100%"><path d="m 12.59,20.34 4.58,-4.59 -4.58,-4.59 1.41,-1.41 6,6 -6,6 z" fill="#fff"></path></svg></div></a></div>

sponsor block skips the part where the speaker is talking about a sponsored product/service

But if the video is sponsored then the whole video is about a sponsored product/service.

I'm curious about how sponsorblock works - how does it prevent malicious users from submitting fake segments to skip?

It needs multiple people to submit similar segments, before it starts blocking the segment for everybody else.

Fwiw - paying for YouTube premium removes all ads from all devices and I see it as a strong vote in favor of subscriptions that do so. But, yes, it’s nearly unwatchable in its free state.

Do not subscribe to YouTube Premium. The whole thing just makes the problem worse by still allowing ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is also tied to your real world identity (for payment processing). You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.

Tangential question to anyone reading this: How does uBlock Origin block in-video ads that are in video format? I thought all those are embedded in the video stream and served from the same hosts that serve the video. If not, how has YouTube not changed the way it serves the video to disable such blocking functionality? Note that this is not about text ads that may be overlaid in the video or text ads elsewhere on the YouTube page.

I imagine that encoding the ads into videos would be too expensive. Ads change often and are personalized, so the video streams would also need to be personalized and couldn't be cached and served from a simple edge CDN anymore. Instead each ad is it's own stream which is loaded (or in this case, not loaded, so instead of blocking playback entirely it just skips the ad).

Not a direct answer to your question, but look up a browser extension called "SponsorBlock". It auto-skips in-video ads. These days I don't watch YouTube without this.

>Every time I use the "YouTube" app on my elderly relatives TV and see how often it is interrupted with adverts I count my blessings that this add-on exists.

Sad reality is Google can make ad blockers obsolete if they really wanted to but I don't think it will happen anytime soon since antitrust lawsuit is pressuring them to ease aggressive business practices.

I switched from Spotify to a YouTube premium account. I get addless YT, YT Red (never used) and YT music for almost the same price as Spotify.

Set up something like a pi-hole.

Unfortunately, Pi-hole does not work for Youtube ads... At least, I have been unable to find a reliable way to implement it. My house would be much better for it, but I can not seem to find a solution.

It may be the devices not honouring your DNS directives. Sometimes they will still reach out to their own resolvers.

It helps if you have a network perimeter firewall to block unauthorized DNS usage.

I think youtube serves ads from its own domain, as a first party. This makes it harder for a pihole to block. Ublock does it differently, looking at elements etc...a pihole just tries to block dns requests to ad domains, not looking at code that your browser is trying to load.

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