This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
if you have an apple tv and an iphone, use youtube in the browser with adguard and airplay. No ads, no bs
Or get a Chromecast and smarttube...
I just pay for YouTube premium family. We all get add free YouTube. Plus music which we all use. It's a great value and no hastle. More money goes to creators this way as well.
Thank god then I can pay individual creators, too, while I pay for premium.
Everyone is a netflix now.
This is the right answer. If more people subscribed... Well, it wouldn't have to be this way.
Android: revanced manager
Pc: firefox+ublock+dearrow+sponsorblock
AndroidTv: smartTubeNext
I haven't seen an ad in years
I wouldn't call them 'better' alternatives. They're easier to install for sure. Personally, I've used revanced, newpipe, and libretube and love them all. I stuck with newpipe, since that's what my family uses now, and it's easier to troubleshoot when I have it too. And revanced takes some steps, more than just "install this package, done".
What's the difference between smart tube and smatttubenext?
Smarttube next is the bleeding edge beta version, it gets fixed much faster and supposedly has more bugs though I've never ran into one
it's the one after
They have actually started serving ads with a skip button... That only skips to the next ad.
Thats why i have a dumb tv with a little linux pc attached to it, so i can open piped and jellyfin in my librewolf browser.
Tell me more, pretend I am in idiot...how do I do this?
also get a dumb tv ofc
edit: despite what people will say, ubuntu is still a rock solid distro. Alternatively, tumbleweed is brilliant too.
despite what people will say, ubuntu is still a rock solid distro. Alternatively, tumbleweed is brilliant too.
real!! just do the thing to disable snaps and it's perfect for anyone
EDIT: actually turns out snaps have gotten really good lately, ubuntu is still great!!!
You don't need a dumb TV, just switch the input. If your TV shows ads when connected to other inputs, yeet that TV out of your house today.
Disconnect it from your network. Hard to serve ads if it can't contact the servers it is pulling them from.
Got a new TV a month ago. Fucked up and connected it to wireless, no idea what I was thinking. The only way to kill the connection (from the TV side) was a factory reset.
Windows is like that now. Once you enter an internet connection, you're screwed. No way out but a full reinstall.
Not only is this true and annoying, but other things about the ads are getting worse, too.
I recently had to factory reset my TV and, after the first time I opened the YouTube app, immediately had to find the "don't play video preview" option. It worked, except for the huge banner ad at the top of the list of videos, which still saw fit to play with deafening sound when I didn't immediately change the video selection. I can't find a setting to disable this.
Also, I've noticed the "fewer ads for this long video" message popping up during videos longer than thirty minutes (and now it seems like longer than twenty minutes). Not only is that message condescending like they're doing me a favor, but I'm pretty sure it's not true, at least not by much; and the ads are definitely longer and mostly unskippable.
Like someone else says in this thread, it feels like extortion.
Try this, if your TV can run it: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ No ads, and there is even sponsor block included, so you don’t have to hear the annoying „segue to our sponsor“ and „please like and subscribe“ nonsense.
It's funny because I only hear about ads now from you guys. I never see them myself.
Using freetube on a Linux media player connected to my TV and Newpipe on the phone.
I like to open multiple tabs on what I'm going to watch next, and Freetube is a bit clunky with the window management (I wish they had tabs!). So far uBlock has been doing an impeccable job...but these days I can see it struggling a bit more. I can see youtube REALLY tries to give me an ad first, sometimes when you open the video, you can see the first frame of an ad instead of the thumbnail while it starts buffering, then it skips to the video. The ad is not shown, but the first frame of an ad sometimes escapes into the video while it buffers at the beginning, for a second.
I experienced this crazy onslaught of advertising to the point of reducing how much I watched YouTube. I was pretty upset and not at all inclined to pay, especially since YouTube was even putting ads on my own videos without me seeing a single cent, because my channel is too small.
Then my partner bought me a few months of a Premium Subscription as a Christmas gift.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Combined with background music on mobile, it's changed my life.
I'm still unimpressed with the business model, but the alternative is so far worse.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn't require self hosting and I'll happily move my content there.
To me this is way too much like extortion. The more they do this the less I want to give them money.
Also I need to be logged on everywhere, which I don't want to (have to), mostly for privacy and data harvesting reasons.
It also does not help that when I want to see something and jump around in a video, I get the same ad 30 times. No exaggeration.
The thing is... All the premium features USED TO BE FREE AND AVAILABLE UNTIL THEY LOCKED THEM BEHIND A PAY WALL.
I used to be able to have YouTube playing in the background, reduced ads, etc. All of the features.
Now, I still do because I use Firefox + ublock on mobile. Yeah, I can play this shit with my screen off (Firefox + unlock + desktop mode + turn screen off).
Fuck 'em.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.
My problem is that I don't really want Google -- a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining -- logging and data-mining everything I watch.
YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it's not buying any kind of no-log service -- in fact, it's just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That's not the service that I want to buy from Google.
What I'd be willing to get from Google is a "no log" service.
I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I'm fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data...but I want part of that service to be that they aren't logging what I do and data-mining my data.
I don't like the model of "we don't charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can". I'm fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn't what I want for myself.
I’m going to show this real quick and then we’re going to move on, so pause the video if you want to take a closer look…
Phone: rings
Me: "better pause Youtube so that I can answer without noise in the background"
Youtube: plays ad with even louder audio
Me:
A bit of a PSA for LG owners running webOS:
I rooted my tv and now have adless youtube, but apparently root is not a prerequisite - there also installation using dev mode. Admitedly, haven't tried it and it's probably less convenient to get it set up, but then it should be a one time thing.
I have an LG with WebOS and have youtube premium and haven't seen any ads so far (though it may be regional). Cheers for the link, tough. I wonder if it works on Japanese versions
I've got an LG C1 and have been using homebrew with Dev mode for a while now.
Can confirm it is very easy to do if you have a basic tech knowledge base.
The only inconvenience is sometimes after updates it will delete the homebrew apps but its a 5 minute job to get them back and ive only had it happen probably 3 times over a year.
"Youtube no ads" - the homebrew app, works flawlessly as if it were the original app with all of your subs etc but every now and then a tiny banner comes up begging me to subscribe to premium which I actually love because I can keep telling them to fuck off. The frequency of the little banner is probably once every few times you open the app and its non-intrusive.
Overall the LG dev mode trick with the Youtube No Ads app has been the cleanest and most enjoyable out of the box experience compared to alternative frontends etc.
I also noticed that they started showing ads upon opening YouTube on Android TV.
Google sucks so bad.
I used to watch on ps4, but couldn't stand the ads anymore so I bought a new PC and repurposed my old PC into a Linux TV box. Now I watch freetube on my TV with no ads and no tracking.
Imagine watching YouTube. Your kid, spouse, grandparent, whatever falls and gets badly hurt. You pause the video (out of habit, instead of shutting off the TV) to tend to them. You toss the remote as you rush off the couch, the remote is lost. Instead of silence so you can hear whether they're breathing and be able to hear and talk to the emergency services dispatcher, you hear an unskippable ad. They perish, because the dispatcher couldn't hear you and get the ambulance truck to your door in time.
Imagine watching YouTube. You're alone in your house. You hear something at the window behind you. You pause the video, since it's probably nothing, to listen more intently. Instead of silence to allow you hear the burglar, you hear an ad for something you would never buy, as the burglar breaks into your house and attacks you for that sweet, sweet PS5. You perish, because you couldn't react in time.
Edge cases? Maybe. Possible? Yes. Will YouTube/google be charged with accessory to murder? I highly doubt that.
Pause ads are a very bad, and very dangerous, idea.
I’ve been a subscriber for years. Even though it’s expensive there’s no question that my high level of usage justifies it. I get more per dollar than from Prime Video or Netflix, and that’s for sure.
I’m glad YT still has a zero ad tier. Prime now shoves ads inline during shows even though I’m a paying subscriber. Hulu always has. Netflix will at some point.
