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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

I finally broke down and paid for YouTube Premium. There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays. It is absolutely mindblowing the level of nonstop ads they shove down your throat in-between (and during) every single video now. Completely unwatchable otherwise. And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability. Even pihole doesn't work anymore; they've obviously figured out how to get around the DNS issue. It just seems like every day things are getting worse.

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As far as I can tell, ublock origin still works without a hitch, so just hook up a laptop/ tower to the TV and run YT in a browser?

When casting to the TV you get ads, even though you don't in the browser! I just tried it, since I had the same idea.

Plug your laptop directly in via HDMI/DP.

Buy an air mouse/keyboard to control it from your couch.

Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Keyboard-W1-Multifunctional-...

The flexible sovereign combo of a general purpose computer and a user agent.

I use a forever-docked ThinkPad x230 under my TV, which can do 1080p and 802.11n (5GHz).

I second the wireless mouse/ keyboard and will add that I bought a trackball mouse just for this, and it's a wonderful fit. No worrying about a proper surface for moving a mouse around.

Thanks for the tip. It works with both an HDMI cable and wirelessly via AirPlay.

I've been doing this for many years. The latest incarnation is an Intel NUC, which you can also use for other random home server stuff, and for vintage console emulation.

What we need is a good, simple dumbtv interface for a computer with network access and a DVB card/stick. One that can also bring up a full-screen browser window to deal with streaming service DRM. Have been considering getting something together with rust+gstreamer starting by cloning my old Philips dumbtv interface while using mplayer/mpv hotkey standards for everything else.

The all-encompassing, endlessly complicated yet somehow still inflexible Kodi is a bad solution for people like me. Let's start by making a dumbtv out of a cheap linux box + a monitor.

Perhaps too inconvenient for some, but use an hdmi cable for a direct hookup instead of (I'm assuming) a chromecast. Maybe I'm just old fashioned at this point, but my "TV" is just used as a monitor to a dedicated media tower running windows.

I have an Amazon FireTV and one day, when I had my work Windows PC at home, it could stream via Bluetooth (like an external screen). There was lag when starting / changing videos, but otherwise it seemed to work well enough.

Don't most smart TVs have Bluetooth today? In my case, the FireTV is plugged into my (dumb) PC monitor.

It is called Miracast, via Wi-Fi Direct.

A chromecast, from my understanding, is just a web browser. Your device pushes a URL to the cast and the cast loads the web page.

It's not surprising you can't cast without ads - adblock would have to be installed on the chromecast not the device doing the "casting."

I see this sort of thing as a tax on the less-technologically-sophisticated. That's the essence of the whole tech business culture: Morlocks and Eloi.

SPOILER ALERT

> A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_time_machine

Here the "classes" are derived from technical skill and knowledge. It might seem bizarre to us here on HN but just knowing about e.g. ublock origin let alone how to install it makes you one of the elite.

I don't really know how to feel about all this. On the one hand, it seems regressive to me to herd folks into silos and milk them (FAANG). On the other hand, people have to take some personal responsibility for their own education and agency, right? Computers aren't really that hard? No one's holding a gun to their heads to make them use FAANG products and services. Certainly, the options to live a more free and open life are there, eh?

Mickey Mouse finally goes out of copyright next year.

It's really 50/50 because many people don't know it's even possible to have the better experience. Exploiting them and herding them into silos is extremely unjust. They should be educated or they should at least ask some techies. But I partially agree that even they should strive to inform themselves better because nobody is going to go to them and strike a conversation exactly on this topic.

As for the others, there I am fully with you. They are quite aware it can be done and they just can't be bothered to do it. To me that's an informed choice and thus -- consent. They don't get to complain about squat because they made the conscious choice.

I recently did the same. I swear they dialed up the ads to 11 in the last year. I was going to start tracking the ads:content ratio. I recall once for a 5 minute video I got: two 15sec un-skippable ads before any content, then a 15sec un-skippable ad followed by a skippable ad (7sec) at 1:15, then another two 15sec un-skippable ads at 3:10. I decided two things: the cost of premium was less than how much I value my time (watching ads), and that I enjoy the content available on YouTube more than similarly priced media subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc.).

>> There is literally no other option to watch YouTube on a TV nowadays

I use https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext Smart Tube Next on a Firestick. I side loaded both the beta and release versions with adb. I have not seen a commercial since. If Release doesn't work, try Beta. One of them always seems to work.

>> And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022

Next best thing: I bought a Samsung TV last year and never accepted the Terms and Conditions. No ads.

Edit: fixed link syntax

Why don't you use a regular computer plugged to the TV? All you need is a wireless keyboard+trackpad combo.

With firefox and an ad blocker I don't have any youtube ads. Also netflix shows start faster on a browser than they did when I was using a chromecast.

I’m using SmartTube app on the FireTV. Works pretty well, no ads you can also pair your phone and cast. Just make sure app is always up-to-date, youtube keeps changing things and breaks app from time to time.

Not directed at you, but the DNS thing I have to say something and will keep doing it. We got hoodwinked with HTTPS. We handed over to the tech giants, on a silver platter, a secure and soon to be unstoppable mechanism that allows them to go straight from their servers to our eyeballs. We gave up our ability to control and intercept the content flowing through our networks and PCs.

The DNS and other Pihole stuff is a last ditch effort and a poor hack when really we should be able to inspect and alter all packets going through our networks.

And you see it. Your pihole hack doesn't work anymore. Because that was always a loophole and they're closing it now again with DoH (DNS over HTTPS).

All under the guise of privacy. Because somewhere sometime a long time ago an ISP added ads to your web pages and redirected DNS.

>And it's impossible to buy a dumb TV in 2022, so you're stuck with the official Android/Roku YouTube apps that have no ad-blocking capability.

You can just do literally the same thing you'd do with dumb TV and connect computer to one of it's HDMI ports. "Smartness" of a TV does not take away any feature from it, unless you're so hurt by software updates - which you can simply disregard by not connecting the TV to the internet.

I feel like I'm about to get to this point myself. It's absolutely insane that any decently popular video will cut to ads so often, without any regard for continuity. Much worse than cable ever was.

Just take the Raspberry you are using for the PiHole, slap on Firefox+uBlock on there and you are good to go.

There is likely a free ad free method of watching YouTube on your TV. Anything based on android or LG webOS has ad-free YouTube apps (that don’t require root etc), and with the added benefit of skipping sponsor segments

Ehh.. with an android TV media device you can sideload something like smarttube next and have youtube on your TV without ads.

It requires some investment of time and money, sure, but nothing outrageous and far from impossible.

As longs as you don't rely on The Algorithm (i.e. you watch a fixed set of channels), you could probably rig up some kind of NAS to TV streaming set up, using ytdlp to download videos to the NAS.

There are ad-free versions of YouTube for Android TV.

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