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Firefox and uBlock origin results in infinite YouTube ads
10 points by Ahmedb on June 11, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 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/



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


Also:

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


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.


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


I tried both Firefox and Chrome/Edge under Windows 10 running on my MacBook Pro from 2019 — they have this issue. FreeTube doesn’t and I’m happy!


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.


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.


Use FreeTube


One word: invidious


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


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.


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




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