Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn’t this old news? Or “olds” as it were?
I’ve been dealing with this forever.
Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:
If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.
In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.
Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.
The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.
Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.
I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.
Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.
It was reported a decent amoint of time ago and i thought i felt a difference…turned out my isp was sending air bubbles through the internet cable.
After the internet stabilized i noticed exactly zero, just an occasional “restart browser because video’s stopped playing alltogether”
It was previously a “thread.sleep(5000)” in the client code IIRC.
Grayjay :)
Bless you.
YT’s blocked on it, at least on my end. Fuck you, Google. Next step will be closing the API off altogether, discontinuing the browser client, and locking YT to the official app only, with mandatory TPM2.
And finally, if Google’s really feeling greedy, they’d discontinue the free YT tier and make YT a fully paywalled service before nuking all user-generated content and turning YT into another Netflix clone, catering only to commercial content.
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They don’t host anything, they’re just an alternate front-end that lets you download stuff.
YT’s blocked on it.
Just tried it. It works.
Workaround got released, that same issue just updated itself to indicate that. Still shitty of Google to be going full Reddit like this though.
Is google’s company motto still ‘Don’t be evil’?
They removed that from their official code of conduct in 2018.
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I’ll do that before watching an ad.
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Great idea. Eventually, and if enough ask, it could be a thing.
I love how you’re just doing your bit lol
A lot of my favorites are already on Nebula. I’d ask the rest to follow but that would require a google account.
I also asked some creators, but they can’t because of the Google partnership Programm, it prohibits reupload on other platforms
It’s a good thing I’m patient when it comes to when the videos load. If they keep doing this, I’ll just find another platform. Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
Yeah Peertube is awesome. It already scales very well with its tech. Its been growing too. I think its good to have multiple alternatives. Its a good free option.
Ultimately the platform is the last important part of watching a video. If the creators can get more $$/activity going somewhere else they will. It happened to Vimeo, it will happen to Youtube.
Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
I mean, Nebula is commercial service and I assume that they’d profile, the same as YouTube. Like, if you’re okay with that, you can get YouTube Premium.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
I’m still skeptical that this is going to scale sufficiently either in bandwidth or in amount of content.
https://peertube.fediverse.observer/ for people who want to try it, though.
I mean, at least Nebula is owned by the content creators. Eliminate the middle man and all that.
Fair enough.
I’ve been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me “ad blockers aren’t allowed” at work where I’m forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.
I run portable Firefox on my work PC. I refuse to use chrome. some of our apps require Edge, but outside of that, I don’t touch chrome.
I switched to Firefox basically as soon as ublock origin didn’t work on chrome. It was easier than I thought it would be.
uBlock Lite is simply not as potent, so it’s understandable it can be beaten. Almost like Google is abusing their monopoly
Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It’s an awful experience. But they’ll leave my browser before my adblocker does.
Same. When I opened the Stats for Nerds pop-up, I noticed that I was being throttled to 1500kbps. Anything above 720p was unplayable this week.
But apparently the Ublock Origin devs yet again figured out another workaround, because streaming speeds are back to normal for me as of yesterday.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
Lol, this is exactly why I use Lemmy. Sure there might be less engagement than reddit. But I’d rather gargle a bucket of diarrhea than go back to that shitty place.
Amen.
So say we all.
So say we all.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
just use invidious instead
This is also a good beginner way to learn about self hosting in docker.
Freetube can make a great backup for when google inevitably breaks something.
And for thise videos you really cant miss there is always yt-dlp scripted to download a channels latests video on a schedule straight to jellyfin of course.
I have not visited the youtube website in more then a year.
It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in
This doesn’t seem very straightforward…
it’s like lemmy: you choose an instance, make an account, import your subscriptions from YouTube and done. you can watch all channels from there
Ok, so there are hosted instances? At face value this looks like you need to self host. Which I am more than capable of both in terms of equipment and experience. I just don’t want to go that far to watch youtube. Thanks for explaining.
not many but there are
Sadly, most of the instances seem to be completely nonfunctional. Nadeko.net seemed to be the only one working for months.
So it’s not very straight forward lol?
Oh no, where will I get my AI slop?
Like it or not, YouTube still has a fuckton of good, informative tutorials and advice on how to fix things or make things made by individuals with a phone camera and no script, who make them not for money but for the pride in sharing their knowledge. I shared some fix it videos for my van and a very obscure phone, and consumed a lot of fix it videos for washing machines, motorbikes and furniture.
Give it a couple of years. AI is just getting started.
This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can’t afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There’s countless other anecdotes like that over the years.
This is what sucks so much about Google’s monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible
I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it’s an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I’m quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven’t seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they’re working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
I would but my issue with that is that SponsorBlock doesn’t work on downloaded videos.
Skytube has an option for clipping mid-video ads out of downloaded videos, if that helps.
I use SponsorBlock for more than just skipping sponsored segments. It’s also useful for skipping intros, “like and subscribe” messages, and other general annoyances in most YouTube videos. Once you get used to it, you can’t go without.
Same here. The SponsorBlock in SkyTube skips intros and “like and subscribe”, too. Even in downloads.
Good to know, thanks.
Me too. I’m up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they’re likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but…deleted by creator
Right. At the end of the bullshit, the content still plays to completion if the user hits play. We can script and Ai and remove ads all day long after a program snags the feed.
Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I’m that level of anal
I’m not really following video DRM, but my understanding is that Widevine won’t run in a VM with a virtualized video card like that.
I’m sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
Nah. How would you crack down a program that just play the videos in the background and then just capture the content while it’s played?
Just queue up a bunch of vidoe you wanna watch, and let the program just essentially screen record it.
Well if you say “DRM”? Well we could share it to a display that itself is hacked and record all the signals.
Unless they are doing proctoring as if it were a test, there will always be some way to circumvent it.
Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
Imagine adblock re-rencoding software that picks mp4s clean based on repeated content(ads). The user could select each ad as they happen, mark them as such and let it identify them from there. Imagine sharable or federated caches of these ad records between users.
Someone who can code, please, imagine it.
What they should be imagining instead is a better video sharing platform. There are alternatives already…
Cause all you need is your imagination!
And billions of dollars to build and run the site with servers worldwide. No biggie
I’m so used to the sponsorship thing that I just instinctively tap/click the right side of the screen a few times to skip it.
(As for why I don’t use sponsorblock: I don’t block them because I wanna take a few seconds to take a peak into the sponsor segment to make sure they don’t have very evil sponsors like ahem “Betterhelp” (I don’t trust someone that still have that as a sponsor in 2025)
Edit: Also, I’m pretry sure someone will build a locally run AI model that can detect the ads/buffering and cut it out. “AI” might not give you true information in terms of search results, but pattern recognition is like its main job, right?
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using
yt-dlp, required an account and login from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
I’d just hop a vps around to different countries.
…I’d never do it here, admins, honest lol
It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It’ll be a UX hit, so it’ll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can’t stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don’t require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
can’t stop us from HDMI capturing
Look up HDCP.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
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How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I’ve never looked into this.
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strip out the HDCP
Interesting, I had figured that was possible in principle but hadn’t kept up with what was actually around.
But still, the HDCP stream is decompressed video, so if you want to save it, you’ll have to either put it through yet another layer or lossy compression, or burn a ridiculous amount of disk space compared to the compressed stream that Youtube sent to your computer.
We’ll see how things go. Google in the past has made occasional modest gestures to get in the way of downloading, but they haven’t made serious effort to prevent it. Who knows whether that will last.
They aren’t fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
I break HDCP right now. Those keys have been leaked for AGES. $10 amazon HDMI copy in between your videocard and the capture.
I’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.
I like https://github.com/ArabCoders/ytptube gui. Only started using it yesterday, so far for indovidual videos. However it looks like it can also watch new videos being uploaded, thought not tried it myself.
Use docker compose for quick deployment
I mean, you don’t need anything; it’ll work with no flags. I have these:
$ cat ~/.config/yt-dlp/config --embed-subs --embed-metadata --embed-chapters --embed-thumbnail --sponsorblock-mark=all $That’ll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
Also if you just want the audio to listen to (I like to do this with TTRPGs) you can do:
yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio
Also works great in a pinch for getting sounds and music for FoundryVTT.
I’m pretty sure that it defaults to best quality.
goes looking at man page
By default, yt-dlp tries to download the best available quality if you don't pass any options. This is generally equivalent to using -f bestvideo*+bestaudio/best. However, if multiple audiostreams is enabled (--audio-multistreams), the default format changes to -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best. Similarly, if ffmpeg is unavailable, or if you use yt-dlp to stream to stdout (-o -), the default becomes -f best/bestvideo+bestaudio.So I think that it should normally pull down the best audio unless you get into some situation where YouTube doesn’t offer a format that simultaneously has the combination of highest audio quality with the highest video quality; if it has to do so to get the highest video quality then, it’ll sacrifice audio quality.
EDIT: Hmm. I could have sworn that there was more text about prioritizing relative audio and video quality at one point in the man page, but I don’t see anything there now. Maybe it can just always get the best audio quality, regardless of video quality, can pull 'em entirely separately.
Note that subtitles doesn’t include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --embed-auto-subs
Thanks.
EDIT: There isn’t an
--embed-auto-subs, but there is a--write-auto-subs.Fixed thanks.
I’m a filthy Windows user that’s too lazy to migrate my main PC to Fedora.
> Path\to\yt-dlp.exe -P <target directory> <URL>Multiple URLs can be separated by spaces. Put any URLs with ampersands in quotes or remove the ampersand and following arguments.
You can find a list of all the arguments on the yt-dlp github page
I’ll wait.
I’ve noticed occasional “buffering” before playback starts through the past week or so. Takes like ten seconds before the video starts playing. Hasn’t been worse than that so far, knock on wood.
Youtube feels like an impossible service to actually compete with, whether through the enormous and complicated setup required or amassing creators/users. It’s basically a monopoly and it sucks. One will just have to resist Google’s bullshit using whatever means available for as long as possible.
Peertube is working on breaking the monopoly. I try to use it more.
Never happening.
It kind of is already happening. For example @lfdi@bawü.social is soon to be making their instance available for state related institutions.
Small steps in a big picture.
Test comment, please ignore. Jerboa doesn’t recognize that and I’m curious if the punycode version would be.
@lfdi@xn–baw-joa.social
Edit: interesting. Yes.
Still I prefer buffering over the inane noises of commercials
Yeah, I’d genuinely rather watch whatever amount of seconds forced ads are of black, silent screen than see an ad. It sucks and is awkward, but whatever.
Yeah, I run multiple ad-blockers and haven’t noticed any slowdown or other degradation.
Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol
I feel like this has been happening for a while, but maybe it’s just that YouTube’s website is shite.
