Firefox and uBlock origin results in infinite YouTube ads

10 points by Ahmedb 1 year ago | 12 comments

A lot of people on reddit are reporting strange behavior when using Firefox and uBlock origin on Youtube like infinite back to back ads and failure to play videos.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1atwzem/comment/l82adtm/

shzhdbi09gv8ioi 1 year ago |

I want to take this opportunity to pitch FreeTube, a open source youtube player that features:

  - Ad blocking
  - SponsorBlock
  - Subscriptions without account
  - Latest videos from your subscriptions
  - Use YouTube without Google tracking you using cookies and JavaScript
  - and more

making youtube a usable thing again

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

smarm52 1 year ago | |

Also:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

torunar 1 year ago | |

I’d also would like to add that in my case FreeTube has lower resource impact than YouTube in a browser. When I was watching YouTube videos in a browser, my CPU fan was running constantly which is not the case with FreeTube: the fan never starts when I use the app.

ddorian43 1 year ago | | |

Probably your browser isn't using the gpu correctly (example if it was an ubuntu snap)

petercooper 1 year ago |

Video transcoding at scale seems such a "solved problem" nowadays, I'm surprised YouTube hasn't moved to baking ads into the main video stream directly when they're served to non-Premium users - they control the player so could still let people skip them after certain time periods, etc. Maybe the revenue lost to extra compute needed doesn't balance out yet.

bobdvb 1 year ago | |

Encoding is terribly computationally expensive. You wouldn't want to do it at scale for every viewer, the RoI would be poor.

What you can do, is splice in pre-encoded ads and that works okay if done correctly. It's also practically impossible to detect/block.

anbardoi 1 year ago |

Use FreeTube

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1 year ago |

One word: invidious

ksherlock 1 year ago | |

I love invidious but two or three times a month, youtube rolls out an update that breaks it.

eg, last week (not yet bypassed): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734

gaws 1 year ago | |

Invidious isn't stable. YouTube keeps pushing releases that break it, and Invidious is too slow to keep up. Freetube and `yt-dlp` are the only way forward.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1 year ago | | |

Updates also break yt-dlp and I assume the same is true about this freetube.