I know, that YouTube uses the same domain for video and ad serving, therefore DNS-based ad-blocking would not work to block Video Ads.
Is there a workaround, you guys are using?
ublock origin for pc and revanced for mobile.
Already have a thread for revanced here:
https://techenclave.com/threads/revanced-possible-successor-to-vanced-utube.207226/
1 Like
That is too much hassle, especially for the devices you do not own.
Isn’t there AdBlock for the whole network? Perhaps we can sniff the packets and reject them based on the URL. I know that is nearly impossible to do as routers do not work on the application layer.
Unfortunately no. Even for ublock origin and revanced, YT ad blocking has become a moving target -
uBlockOrigin/comments/1atwzem
If it is too much then best to get a YT subscription. Perhaps one of the Mods can merge this to the Pihole thread.
you still get *some *ads tho so its not exactly a fool proof solution
By solution, do you mean subscription ? If yes, please suggest a fool proof solution to the OP, other than, of course, not using YT.
nope there isn’t any, I just wanted to point out the caveats, anyways I use Revanced extended and just build the apks myself every month, takes me like 5 minutes for no ads/sponsorblock/return youtube dislikes and other custom patches, more than worth it imo
1 Like
Unfortunately Google is actively countering Revanced now. I use Revanced with Premium and have no issues but my family members on the same version and network are facing buffering issues every now and then. If someone blinks first, it will be Revanced rather than Google.
eh, I trust the community, we have always bounced back even if it took some time.
Not faced any buffering issues but I find myself having to restart the phone every few days as it gets hot. This has happened since the last revanced rebuild
Next step, server-side ad injection.
2 Likes
What’d be the approximate cost of running the YouTube platform for one day in INR?
not gonna happen anytime soon, the hardware costs alone would not make it worth it, I have worked on it in my prev org and our usecase was miniscule and still took up the bulk of our infra costs
I will leave this here (I have not personally used this trick yet) -
AfterVanced/comments/19c8uj3
Google would be pretty much doing the cost-benefit analysis. If they are losing more revenue due to adblockers, then the additional cost might be worth it.
I was using SmartTube on Android TV with a normal account and was facing the issue where the video would endlessly keep buffering at each Sponsorblock segment. Switched to my YT Premium account and it started working again.
They are definitely testing a lot of things to break all existing methods.
There are way too many people who just coughed up the money for YT Premium for google to consider it, unless there’s some major breakthrough in video encoding, there’s no way it would work embedding content in the video stream itself, the hardware costs are way too high considering the throughput google goes through for YT, the main issue is dynamic advertising, they’ll need to encode videos in real time for billions of users at a time, each time, they’ll need to use adsense and insert an appropriate advert for a user and even that is a monumental task in a normal scenario, imagine doing it in a video? nah, aint no way, Streaming services have been grappling with this issue for a long time now, and they *just *have to servr content to users, they dont need any dynamic advert in the video itself and even they have pretty much hit the wall for scalability, there’s a reason why bitrates dropped dramatically during covid, why even now, bitrates for streaming services wont exceed 15-25mbps and even at that, its rare you ever hit the full bitrate for a stream, Scalability is a massive issue, specially for something like encoding where there’s just no way they can ignore the blocking IO in cpu/storage for each video.
The only way I can figure is they’ll cut the videos into clips, insert adverts dynamically and try to make it as seamless as possible, and even this is pretty easy to work around, the only way it’ll work is if the video from server itself has adverts embedded in it which is what it says in the article
yep, that they are, Revanced has been a lot less stable these days, I think google is counting on the fact that premium is cheap enough for people, that they’d rather pay for it then go through this PITA process of having to build/install revanced again.
I’m good with Revanced till now. I have a github pipeline setup which cooks a new build every week automatically and I get a mail with download link.
Been using this way since 1.5 years no issues at all.
5 Likes
ah that’s actually a good idea, I’ll try to setup something similar
There’s someone who’s doing it on a public repo:
I’ve posted it here and in other revanced threads multiple times but it gets buried obviously.
1 Like
, this is actually pretty interesting, I take my words back, its not unfeasible for google to insert ads server side folks