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Comment by coding4all | Hacker News Reader

Thank god for Minitube [1] and youtube-dl [2] . youtube-dl can download videos from not only YouTube, but over 500 different services.

[1] http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

[2] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

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Install adblock, it blocks youtube video ads too

In particular, Adblock Edge. They claim not to whitelist. I doubt ad blocking is going to work for Youtube much longer, though. If they can detect when you're not actually watching, what's to stop them from just not letting you watch the video if you refuse to watch at least two seconds of the ad?

"Mohan said the goal is to make sure that advertisers’ video spots run for at least two seconds while covering at least 50 percent of screens -- the industry standard. "

I am sure someone else, if not adblock, would come with something new to beat this new system too.

Ghostery + NoScript does just fine. Apparently people don't know but, NoScript also blocks flash, silverlight, and html5 videos/storage. I didn't even know Youtube had Ads until I went to a friend's house.

Adblock is one of the worst plugins you can ever install if you still wish to use your browser without hogging resources.

Chrome based browsers have µBlock[1] and µMatrix[2] extensions to mitigate this very issue of hogging resources. Unfortunately these are not ported to Firefox yet.

EDIT: Links to source code for both

[1]https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[2]https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

NoScript is one of the worst plugins you can ever install if you want to have a modern web experience without per-site configuration. Meanwhile, Ghostery caused a number of web sites to stop working for me - commenting in particular, IIRC, but it's been a few years.

ABP could be better implemented, for sure, but mostly it just works.

4OD, channel 4's on demand service in the UK, now detects if you're running adblock and prevents you from playing the video unless you disable it.

This will soon be common to all as based services.

I am pretty sure this option was available for a long time. It would be common already if companies went to take that path

Except it only checks on page load. If you open the page with adblock disabled and then switch it on, it works.

4OD also serves ridiculous 2 minuet broadcast TV style blocks of Ads. This is why everyone runs AdBlock on their site, and why they fight a loosing battle to try a force people to view them.

Youtube adverts are tolerable, and sometimes i even watch past the 5 second skip if it is funny or interesting. 4OD ads get blocked outright.

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