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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Arms race towards people running their own private YouTube instances which pre-fetch subscriptions and recommendations to skip ads. If the video hasn't been downloaded already it pretends to play the ad in the background while waiting. A minor inconvenience, but hardly the end of the world.

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Yes it's TiVo for Youtube. And this...THIS...is the real use case for desktop AI: Detecting ads and automatically skipping them.

Funny how the AI barons never mention how AI can empower normies against them.

Same happened to me at a software conference. Ask a bunch of presenters about "When was the last time you put the User before yourself?

Crickets man. Crickets.

Be even easier if they provided an MRSS feed! I wonder if a popular channel on YT started making their content available in an easy to parse format like MRSS if they'd notice a significant loss in YT viewers in favor of it. Of course, they'd then lose the ad share, so probably not a thing that will happen.

How fast would YT issue a C&D if someone created an app that did this for you so that you just entered in the channels you follow, and then it would just check every so often for new content?

You're describing Freetube. I use YouTube daily without an account, ads, or algorithms.

https://freetube.io

Happy user here as well.

How reliable is it? I used one of these apps from the F-Droid store (can't remember if it was this or NewPipe) but reliability was poor.

It's desktop aplication.

How unrealible NewPipe was for you?

Unreliable enough to say "screw this" and use the regular app and set up pi-hole

Pi-hole is not able to block ads on YouTube entirely. They are not DNS based.

That link didn't work for me but the github repo is here: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp

https://freetubeapp.io/

Shout-out Nebula, an alternative YT/creator platform which has no ads or sponsor segments. It's a monthly subscription but fairly cheap, and it gives you access to all videos on the platform (unlike patreon which is for a single creator). The monthly subscription cost is then split between all creators on the platform.

It's not a 1-1 alternative to YT as creators have to opt in, so most (imo low effort) videos/creators won't be on there. It's fantastic for any tech/engineering/history/news though, high quality/effort vids with no bullshit.

Note: I have no vested interest in Nebula, I'm just a user that's happy to support good creators and a platform that's actively opposed to advertising.

If this counts as an ad/spam - let me know and I'll delete this comment.

My god, we've re-invented the VCR.

It will be a VCR of VCR

Sounds like a podcast app, but for video. A mix of yt-dl and some checks for specific channel updates.

Horrifying amounts of local storage required though.

Storage is also horrifyingly cheap these days. Was just looking at recertified enterprise HDDs – can get a 20TB drive for $200. Wish I had some more spare change lying around!