OT - Video playback blocking - I'll never figure it out

[BillG]

Since the experiment started, video playback is sometimes blocked and sometimes not. And not for every video.

For the past week, all have been blocked, In the past several days, many of the workaround sites have also been blocked.

This morning, I heard bumper music on a talk radio show and went to look for it. The video played perfectly.

I tried clicking on a "suggested" video. I also played. Several more were also successful.

But if I click on the address bar and reload the video, it is blocked. If I paste in the address of a video, it is blocked.

[BigEd]

Is this about YouTube being uncooperative in the presence of adblockers? I wouldn't be surprised if they have a variety of configurations, and you hit a random one. That would be a way for them to test the response to each approach.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Good old Google.  Youtube was nice before Google got its meathooks into it.

[barnacle]

The thing is, if Google made a small charge - ten or twenty bucks a year, about the same as they get from selling all my data, but *without* tracking, profiling, and adverts, I'd cheerfully pay it. But the offer is never made... One can pay for youtube, but at that sort of price per month; way too much for this Yorkshireman.

Neil

[GARTHWILSON]

My site has a lot of links to videos about things like PCB design on YouTube, especially in the 6502 primer.  Altium's channel and Robert Feranec's channel were a couple of favorites.  I used to watch a lot of YouTube videos every day (without an account), but that ended in October when YT started insisting I turn off adblock as a condition to watch.  Someone here made some suggestions by PM, although I can't find it again (I wish phpBB would make it so the search works for PMs also), including FreeTube which somehow lets you watch YouTube videos, so I've been using that.  Chad Burrow also suggested, by email, the AdBlocker Ultimate add-on for firefox.

[BillO]

Mixed feelings here.

I dislike the ads on YT, more because they do not have any relation to my interests than anything else. I mean, after years and years of my watching YT they should know by now what my interests are. That aside, many of the people I watch on YT make at least part of their living from the ad revenue they get. I want their content, so I put up with the ads. There is always something I cam busy myself with while some stupid unrelatable ad is playing .. read and/or respond to email, pay a bill, go get a cup of coffee, update something, get the puppy a treat, put a log on the fire, take a piss, put a load of laundry on, etc., etc.. All stuff I have to do anyway.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

BillO wrote:

There is always something I cam busy myself with while some stupid unrelatable ad is playing .. read and/or respond to email, pay a bill, go get a cup of coffee, update something, get the puppy a treat, put a log on the fire, take a piss, put a load of laundry on, etc., etc.. All stuff I have to do anyway.

Given the length of some of those ads, you could probably do all of that stuff and still not miss anything interesting.

[drogon]

BillG wrote:

Since the experiment started, video playback is sometimes blocked and sometimes not. And not for every video.

For the past week, all have been blocked, In the past several days, many of the workaround sites have also been blocked.

This morning, I heard bumper music on a talk radio show and went to look for it. The video played perfectly.

I tried clicking on a "suggested" video. I also played. Several more were also successful.

But if I click on the address bar and reload the video, it is blocked. If I paste in the address of a video, it is blocked.

Assuming you're talking about YouTube here and not some local hardware/PC/iDevice/fondleslab thing....

YouTube is, and always had been a commercial, advertising supported platform. You don't get something for nothing and the petabytes of storage and people who maintain it and the content creators have to be paid for somehow.

That said, there is a balance between unobtrusive adverts and blatant money grabbing and I think Google have crossed that line...

I use Firefox under Linux, so YMMV, as they say.

The first thing I have is video auto-play blocked. This is a Firefox setting, but you might have to search to find the right parameters as some videos will still play. What happens now is that when YouTube switches to an advert, playback is paused for the duration - so you just get the first frame of the advert then you need to press pay when the frame changes back to the mean feature.

Next is Adblock+ and uBlock Origin plugins.

Right now it's a 'war' between these 2 and YouTube - some days one will work, some days the other - and very occasionally neither, then I rely on the blocked auto-play.

YouTube will win in the end - they have the power and technology to force them upon you - grossly unfair when you're paying per byte for Internet (as I effectively do when out and about using my mobile phone tethered to a laptop).

Firefox is about to have support dropped by the US.GOV though, so that will cause another stir, so keep using it if you can.

Also try using duckduckgo as a search engine - you don't have to use google. https://duckduckgo.com/

But google is everywhere. Even fonts on popular websites come from google - and in grabbing those fonts, you're being tracked...

Quote:

I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign.

... If only.

Good luck..

-Gordon

[barnacle]

Here: Linux (Mint), Firefox, Ublock Origins, Noscript. And FreeTube when YouTube gets too annoying.

Neil

[BillG]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Someone here made some suggestions by PM, although I can't find it again (I wish phpBB would make it so the search works for PMs also)

I believe that was me. I replied via PM from the thread containing the original (hijacking) conversation but did not change the title. Look for

Re: Scrolling an SSD1306 OLED in 6502 assembly

I know more now, but am still hesitant to post it all in public because the Borg is watching and I do not want to give them any help.

[BillG]

drogon wrote:

YouTube is, and always had been a commercial, advertising supported platform. You don't get something for nothing and the petabytes of storage and people who maintain it and the content creators have to be paid for somehow.

That said, there is a balance between unobtrusive adverts and blatant money grabbing and I think Google have crossed that line...

That may be true, but the Borg gets enough information about our interests from what we choose to watch to feed their advertising everywhere else to pay for that storage and bandwidth.

[cbmeeks]

I tried every AdBlocker on YouTube with Firefox and YouTube found a way around them. And, I also use a VPN and would change my location frequently. None of it helped.

So I switched to Brave. Brave is nice but I've seen a few sites like Twitter and Twitch where videos have issues but so far, YouTube is playing with no ads.

[Proxy]

I've stayed with uBlock origin (aka the best adblocker) on Firefox and it works perfectly fine, YT or similar sites don't give me any notification or popups about using an adblocker.

[barrym95838]

Proxy wrote:

I've stayed with uBlock origin (aka the best adblocker) on Firefox and it works perfectly fine, YT or similar sites don't give me any notification or popups about using an adblocker.

It has done a very nice job for me on Edge as well. Not perfect, but darn near.

[allisonlastname]

drogon wrote:

YouTube will win in the end - they have the power and technology to force them upon you

There will always be a way to watch youtube videos without ads, unless google manage to seize control of all computers and entirely eradicate user-written code. Which doesn't seem to far out of their wheelhouse, thinking about it.