Blocking adblockers apparently doesn’t work well enough so google resorts to various forms of gaslighting (delayed video playback, api randomly returning wrong video, and now skipping video straight to the end).
Had the random API one the other day. Was nuts. Also the 5 second delay for Firefox too when it was a thing.
I get that 5sec delay for the official YouTube app weirdly enough
I thought I was going insane with the wrong video thing. I have premium but also an ad blocker because the entire internet is a cancerous cesspit without one, so I wonder if I get hit with anti ad blocking measures or I was just tripping?
Use Youtube frontends. Here is Privacy Guides’ page about Youtube frontends. All of Youtube’s BS will disappear.
I think “all of youtubes bs will disappear” is a stretch. I don’t know the whole state of play but I know invidious has had some instability lately.
Sounds like a bug in the filters used by Adblock and Adblock Plus. Afaik uBO or Adguard aren’t affected.
Can confirm, no issues with uBO and Smart Tube Next on my TV.
Firefox with uBO, haven’t seen an add or ran into any issues in ages, both windows and linux.
Shhhhhhhh…don’t let the mainstream know…once EVERYBODY is doing it, they’ll fix it.
Wait. This is Lemmy. Pretty sure there’s like 8 people here…
Exactly 8 upvotes to your comment… Let’s leave it that way.
And Arch, BTW.
Sometimes I need to refresh the page for the video to play but otherwise no issues, ff+ubo ftw
Exactly, this! uBlock Origins will block upwards of thousands of ads/trackers/whatever from YouTube. After it hits about 50k+, it’ll start to act strangely. At that point I just refresh the video and it all goes away. I think this happens when YouTube changes something cached in the browser, which was originally not blocked by uBO, even when uBO might have been updated to block the new stuff. I have uBO on auto-update for this reason. Whenever I notice shit not working, F5 FTW!
Yup it just started doing it to me, AdBlock on firefox. whelp I’ll just download them… https://github.com/Unrud/video-downloader
Use uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock, not AdBlock Plus, not any other crapware. Looking at AdBlock website they have a blurb about only keeping anonymised data and never selling it and yada yada yada, because it goes against their company ethics.
Company ethics. AdBlock is owned by a company. A for-profit entity. How do you think they make their money? Either they sell the data they have gathered (why does an ad blocking extension need to gather user data?) or they have agreements with ad companies.
Compare the websites of AdBlock and uBlock Origin. The first thing on uBlock Origin website is a link to the publicly available source code. That’s trustworthy. AdBlock’s website has a handpicked list of 5 star reviews.
TL; DR: please switch to uBlock Origin and ditch AdBlock, they (the company behind AdBlock) likely have agreements with advertisers (including Google and YouTube) to make money. Your data is being harvested by using AdBlock. You cannot look at the code for AdBlock. AdBlock is not trustworthy.
Thank you for that, I’ll have a look.
You can also just play them directly with MPV or VLC.
I just tried that and it’s not working for me. MPV just closes itself and VLC gives me an error message. Do I need to do more that just drag and drop the URL?
For VLC you need to go to Media > Open Network Stream (or Ctrl+N), then paste the youtube link there.
For MPV use command line
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videocodeVLC still gives me the same error message.
For MPV, it gives me the following error message:
`mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw [ytdl_hook] ERROR: [youtube] 3e9_l2oGxdw: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred Failed to recognize file format.
Exiting… (Errors when loading file) `
Your mpv or vlc versions may be too old. Try updating them to the latest versions.
Well, while MPV might be outdated, I already mentioned that I was able to get YouTube videos working by downloading a newer version of yt-dlp and creating a conf file for MPV that links to it. While I was looking into the problem, the versions available in apt for all three of these are outdated by at least a year, possible 3 years for MPV. I’m not sure if this is just a Linux Mint issue but I have noticed that a lot of the software both preinstalled and available in it’s repository, are pretty outdated.
I might try downloading the newer versions of these later. I got MPV working and that’s good enough for me right now.
Mint is known to use old software in its repositories as it’s based on Ubuntu LTS. The flatpak mpv should work though.
flatpak install flathub io.mpv.Mpvand then run it withflatpak run io.mpv.Mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQIf you don’t want to type
flatpak run io.mpv.Mpvall the time, you can create an alias in your~/.bashrcfile. For example:alias play='flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv'. (After editing your bashrc file, run:source ~/.bashrcto activate the change). Then you can run it withplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I got YouTube videos working in MPV. While I have no idea if the way I did it was technically not correct, all I did was download the newest version of yt-dlp from github and created a file name mpv.conf which links to the yt-dlp python file. I was also able to set a preferred resolution using that conf file.
That is way too much faff if you are watching youtube daily.
Get something like FreeTube, FOSS with all the ad blocking and sponsor blocking automatically enabled. And your subscriptions and other settings are all saved locally.
You can download YouTube videos via yt-dlp and add them to a jellyfin server. If you’d want to watch them without ads and off of Google.
Yeah but I don’t really want to keep the videos. Need one of these alternative sites to hurry up and take off
I’ve been looking into tube archivist actually. Want to get it set up soon and try it out.
Auto downloads, direct to Jellyfin, rules set up to delete them afterwards
I’d imagine there would be a way to automatically delete the file if you’ve watched a certain percentage and it’s been a certain amount of time.
IDK, I’m not a programmer.
It would be pretty trivial to write a 1 line ‘script’ that deletes everything in the directory older than X hours.
I can recommend FreeTube, which is a standalone privacy friendly alternative that gets their videos directly from Google. While also blocking any ads, sponsorships and tracking.
An privacy alternative to Google would be wonderful, but in the meantime we can do it ourselves.
Is this happening to any user in the EU?
Why?
I assume he’s asking because the EU has a bunch of laws that protects users from this kind of shitty behavior. When I went to the EU many of the apps I use became less shitty.
Just use front ends if you don’t care about interacting with the content. It has been a few years since I am used to using them and I dread being forced to go back to youtube again.
I have been using Brave as my browser for years, I have never once seen an ad on YouTube. Nor have I ever had any of the issues that have been reported with people using ad blockers.
I’m using firefox + ublock origin and have never had the reported issues either.
Best setup by far. Changed my internet experience for the better in so many ways.
Folks should also get freetube
I’m leeching premium from a friend so no ads on pc, but because I’m getting sick and tired of all the shorts shit being pushed onto me (even play automatically when I would open the YouTube app) I’m using Grayjay on my phone instead of the official YouTube app. Never ads and it even has sponsor block. Plus you can follow creators instead of channels, across platforms. And downloading a video means you can actually watch it without a connection too. It has more perks then someone paying for premium has. Piracy pais off.
Shorts are the bane of my ADHD ass
I’m going to have to look into Greyjay for sure just for the no shorts part
Yeah I hear ya, same here. Fuck shorts.
Grayjay is from Louis Rossmann, one of the biggest advocates for right to repair. It costs 10 dollars, one time payment, but if you don’t pay it also works. It’s open source. If you have an issue and mail then, they actually respond (fast) to try to solve the issue, or make changes to the app to make it better. It’s really great what they do. And YouTube hates him.
I picked up Grayjay so I can actually watch early access videos from creators I follow on Patreon. I honestly love how it seamlessly integrates multiple services around creators. Also supports Nebula, and IMO provides a nicer experience compared to the official app.
Personally I still use NewPipe (Tubular fork) for my daily viewing just because I kind of prefer that UI
Isn’t it only source available, and not open source, due to a restriction on reusing the code?
Louis said in the announcing video it’s open source, anyone is free to do with it what they want, even if they want to exclude the 10 dollar payment in it. He really doesn’t give a shit.
He did give a warning though:
“if you dare to put malware in it or any other malicious shit, I will hunt you down and destroy you.”
On android I use Revanced. It patches the official Youtube app (patches are open source) to greatly expand the base functionality and offer a lot more customization of the UI.
For me the best features are ad block, sponsorblock (skips in video sponsored segments), and complete excision of shorts from all aspects of the app.
It also works on Youtube Music, effectively allowing free premium (just don’t get the local downloads of your most listened tracks to help save data, but I have unlimited anyway).
I am honestly not against in-video sponsorships because it’s at least vetted by the creator and I can hold them accountable if they push garbage. Also it’s negotiated by them, not some trickle from google. At some point these folks need to get paid.
They get paid whether sponsored sections of the video are skipped or not though, which is the beauty of sponsorblock. Sometimes the sponsor sections are high effort though and worth watching.
Meh sometimes I see a thing I actually want to know about and nothing helps a creator more than using their affiliate links/codes. It’s how they keep getting good sponsors. Even better when I see them promoting something I was already interested in or currently use. It’s an easy way for me to give back to them without having to pay directly. Though I am also happy to sometimes just pay people I like.
There aren’t many products being sponsored through YouTube creators which are actually worth it imo. I mean, the best VPN providers don’t pay loads of money for ads. Same with many other products. Companies focused on mass ad campaigns often have expensive products which are not that great. I did see some which are actually pretty good, but most of it is just average at best.
But I also have a personal hate towards ads in general. We are being overloaded with ads wherever you look. I try to live as ad free as possible. I think sponsorblock is awesome, because the creator still gets payed as no one can see you skipped the promotion part. I also don’t like self promotion parts either. I don’t like begging for likes and subscriptions. If the video is good, it gets a like. If the creator is good, I’ll follow. If it’s really good, I’ll consider patreon. Many of the best creators do not beg for likes and only slightly mention patreon at the outro.
I understand creators need to do it, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t like it so sponsorblock is perfect as creators can continue doing it while I can auto skip. Before I had sponsorblock I never clicked any of the links because of what I mentioned before, so me skipping the parts doesn’t change anything for the creator.
That’s fair, I hadn’t considered that people may actually want to click through on sponsored content to help the creator. I really enjoy not having to see another ad for the usual sponsored brands ever again though (raid, vpns etc) .
Same, that combination never causes me any problems (I use uMatrix too which is always causing problems, but I get to decide which domains to allow cookies, scripts, and XHR requests from/to).
Don’t use brave, they’re shady. LibreWolf with uBlock Origin is plenty.
It’s not so much shady as 1) crypto BS incorporated into it and 2) the CEO is homophobic IIRC.
It does what it does well but I only keep it as chromium browser for when I absolutely need one. Firefox/Mullvad browser are my daily drivers.
Edit: ehhh brave actually has done more sketchy things than I realized
I mean they did also inject affiliate links without the users noticing which is really shady behaviour from a browser because it has one job, open the link I click and nothing else. But that’s just IMHO if that is acceptable for you personally then there is no issue with that.
Wasn’t aware of that. I open brave like every 4 months. That’s not cool for sure
You forgot the VPN service they install without consent.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925192/brave-browser-vpn-windows-11
Wow missed that entirely. That’s messed up. I’m a Mac user so I guess that’s why I didn’t realize it. The way my machine is set up I would’ve known and deleted them immediately.
It’s not so much shady as 1) crypto BS incorporated into it and 2) the CEO is homophobic IIRC.
The “crypto BS” also encompasses running a protection racket whereby Brave man-in-the-middles website ads to replace them with its own, then shakes down the website owners to buy into said crypto BS if they want their lost revenue back.
That counts as shady in my book: an end-user has every right to control what their computer (their property) does, but the third-party interference for the third-party’s benefit crosses the line.
I’ve already updated my initial comment as I’m sure you’ve seen.
I do turn off all the rewards and other BS in the browser, but I will look into Firefox and uBlock. Thank you.
It’s a great combo and the sync between phone/computer with Firefox is excellent
Any reason for picking it over all the other chromium browsers?
It blocks in line ads and trackers, that’s why I have been using it.
I haven’t found any that actively and effectively put privacy front and center while also working basically just as good as chrome (compatibility wise).
Ungoogled chromium with some privacy extensions would probably be a similar experience.
Firefox with user agent switcher addon.
You can’t properly troubleshoot with that. At some point you have to cross reference browsers. So I do safari, Firefox, edge, and a chromium option.
WIth user agent switcher, you can use firefox for the sites that make you use chrome. Hasn’t failed me yet with the three sites I need to use that would not work on firefox without it.
It’s more about checking compatibility/troubleshooting in my line of work. If something doesn’t work first thing we do is cycle web browsers to see if it’s unique to one or more or if it’s consistent. Spoofing agent doesn’t answer the question properly.
I’m confident its people using Chrome with Adblock Plus
I’ve had this issue where youtube is sort of breaking for me, but it shouldn’t matter because I very begrudgingly pay for Youtube Premium.
(I’m not extremely tech savvy to the point where it’s easy for me to set up a raspberry pi or whatever to watch youtube in bed on my tv OK?)
Anyways, sometimes it like, gets weird and the video player gets stuck at 0:00 and loops like 3 seconds of the video.
For quite some time now I’ve had the issue that the video simply refuses to stop playing requiring me to refresh the page. Might be an issue with one of the add-ons too though.
I’ve been having this.
My videos are also randomly going from 4k to 360p, and having long hitches/pauses. Thats assuming the page loads at all, which may take a few refreshes…and its not an internet/connection related issue.
happening with Firefox with ublock origin.
Didnt noticed it with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)
Yep, they suddenly started doing that early this morning after several hours of playing videos just fine.
For a while, I’ve had problems with a patched yt app. Been going on for probably months at this point, but even with the latest ReVanced patches I still end up with, if lucky, video plays for 10 seconds before infinite loading. Makes me have to use the PipePipe (NewPipe fork) app more than I want, but at least I get ad free videos.
I’d use a privacy respecting frontend, but sometimes I like to comment and I have yet to find one that allows me to login and comment on videos.
I’d use a privacy respecting frontend, but sometimes I like to comment and I have yet to find one that allows me to login and comment on videos.
I’m not interested in commenting, but I do want to keep track of my history (across multiple devices). I wish there were a privacy-respecting solution that could do that.
By Louis Rossman’s startup “Futo”. I have a lot of respect for that dude from his right-to-repair activism, but despite that it’s just a good privacy-respecting video app and worth paying for, IMO.
YouTube started throwing playback errors for me this last week on pc (Firefox with ublock and pihole).
I was able to get around it by opening links in a container tab without being signed in. New container for each link
