YouTube videos are skipping to the end for users with adblockers
Some users with adblockers installed have noticed that videos are skipping straight to the end all of the sudden.
Blocking adblockers apparently doesn't work well enough so google resorts to various forms of gaslighting (delayed video playback, api randomly returning wrong video, and now skipping video straight to the end).
Had the random API one the other day. Was nuts. Also the 5 second delay for Firefox too when it was a thing.
I get that 5sec delay for the official YouTube app weirdly enough
I thought I was going insane with the wrong video thing. I have premium but also an ad blocker because the entire internet is a cancerous cesspit without one, so I wonder if I get hit with anti ad blocking measures or I was just tripping?
Use Youtube frontends. Here is Privacy Guides' page about Youtube frontends. All of Youtube's BS will disappear.
I think "all of youtubes bs will disappear" is a stretch. I don't know the whole state of play but I know invidious has had some instability lately.
It's not mentioned there because it doesn't meet the OSI definition, but Grayjay is a source-available Android app that pulls videos from various services (e.g. Nabula, Odysee, PeerTube, etc). I'm hopeful it'll become properly open source at some point.
Oh no!
uBlock Origin updates
Anyway...
More and more Im trusting the fact that ublock origin will correct these issues in short order. Youtube must really hate those guys...
Firefox with uBO, haven't seen an add or ran into any issues in ages, both windows and linux.
Sometimes I need to refresh the page for the video to play but otherwise no issues, ff+ubo ftw
Exactly, this! uBlock Origins will block upwards of thousands of ads/trackers/whatever from YouTube. After it hits about 50k+, it'll start to act strangely. At that point I just refresh the video and it all goes away. I think this happens when YouTube changes something cached in the browser, which was originally not blocked by uBO, even when uBO might have been updated to block the new stuff. I have uBO on auto-update for this reason. Whenever I notice shit not working, F5 FTW!
Sounds like a bug in the filters used by Adblock and Adblock Plus. Afaik uBO or Adguard aren't affected.
Can confirm, no issues with uBO and Smart Tube Next on my TV.
YouTube will not stop until the site is Unusable by anyone without over paying for every second they are there. YouTube as a free site is doomed
If they push hard enough eventually there will be a replacement.
Federation could solve this. All you need is one flagship instance that doesn't allow uploads, but it allows users to create accounts and playlists to act as "the" site for the federated network and then content creators can start their own instances.
I've been having this.
My videos are also randomly going from 4k to 360p, and having long hitches/pauses. Thats assuming the page loads at all, which may take a few refreshes...and its not an internet/connection related issue.
happening with Firefox with ublock origin.
edit Honestly, the youtube pages (and only the youtube pages) act slow and laggy like the CPU is running at 100% doing hard number crunching. yet system monitor shows its not even breaking 10% load on the CPU, and that firefox's process isnt even using half that, so it feels like theres something artificially slowing the page down, in retrospect.
My videos are also randomly going from 4k to 360p, and having long hitches/pauses
I'm seeing this as well. Except I'm not using an adblocker on youtube, and I am paying for youtube premium...
I don't think it's entirely caused by youtube fighting adblockers. I think it's more likely just a regular, boring, old fashioned fuck-up.
Haha that reminds me of a period of my life where I realized it was possible for game devs to detect piracy but instead of making the game say, "not legit copy, cannot play", it would be more subtle and make itself unstable and eventually crash.
I had a pirated copy of RCT3 that would crash regularly after a few hours. Thought maybe that's what was going on, plus it was a good game and worth my money anyways, so I bought a legit copy and installed that.
A few hours into playing, it crashed again.
Oh well, other than the crashing it was still a good game so I don't regret buying it. And I think they sorted it out because my more recent plays didn't see any crashes. I even bought it again on Steam since I'm not entirely sure where the disc is and don't have a drive to read it anyways.
Yup it just started doing it to me, AdBlock on firefox. whelp I'll just download them.. https://github.com/Unrud/video-downloader
You can also just play them directly with MPV or VLC.
That is way too much faff if you are watching youtube daily.
Get something like FreeTube, FOSS with all the ad blocking and sponsor blocking automatically enabled. And your subscriptions and other settings are all saved locally.
You can download YouTube videos via yt-dlp and add them to a jellyfin server. If you'd want to watch them without ads and off of Google.
Yeah but I don’t really want to keep the videos. Need one of these alternative sites to hurry up and take off
I've been looking into tube archivist actually. Want to get it set up soon and try it out.
Auto downloads, direct to Jellyfin, rules set up to delete them afterwards
I can recommend FreeTube, which is a standalone privacy friendly alternative that gets their videos directly from Google. While also blocking any ads, sponsorships and tracking.
An privacy alternative to Google would be wonderful, but in the meantime we can do it ourselves.
Is this happening to any user in the EU?
Why?
Because EU has a track record of putting stop to shitty practices by major corporations.
Would not surprise me if they leave EU out of this just to prevent a potential conflict.
This is what I do anyways because I am too impatient to watch through 15 minutes of blah blah to reach the end and hear, "in my next video I'll actually show you how to dobthe thing that you came here to see."
Give me a decent web page with searchable text and a few pictures (if needed) and I'll be happy.
I was searching on YouTube for seat sizes for a long haul flight and can try to compare different airlines seats. There was so much annoying content that I went to Bing to search (Google is bad now).
That was also pretty bad. I ended up using chatGPT and gave me the answer in 1 minute.
Seems like it's working as intended - have you seen the sponsor to content ratio on YouTube these days?
I actually haven't. Any info on this? I'm curious to see which one is dropping faster.
I don't have exact numbers, (just anecdotals) but SponsorBlock has some basic stats, and so far they've saved people over 3962 years worth of time. By dividing that by how many skips there are, (3,608,826,265) you get roughly 34.6452092 seconds. Per skipped segment, which videos often have multiple of.
This doesn't include videos that are purely promotional sponsored videos disguised as content, (see modern LTT or RyanToyReviews) video content that would break the coherency of the video if skipped or actual non-video ads that are becoming more and more frequent.
SponsorBlock also has options to skip filler in videos, which is hit or miss since it's all community submitted, but..
I'm not having that issue. I also use Freetube as a backup on desktop.
Im amazed at how good libretube is getting honestly
It is honestly great and the only hassle is manually getting your sub list.
I know that once adblockers won't work anymore I will simply avoid YouTube.
Just use front ends if you don't care about interacting with the content. It has been a few years since I am used to using them and I dread being forced to go back to youtube again.
I have been using Brave as my browser for years, I have never once seen an ad on YouTube. Nor have I ever had any of the issues that have been reported with people using ad blockers.
I'm using firefox + ublock origin and have never had the reported issues either.
I'm leeching premium from a friend so no ads on pc, but because I'm getting sick and tired of all the shorts shit being pushed onto me (even play automatically when I would open the YouTube app) I'm using Grayjay on my phone instead of the official YouTube app. Never ads and it even has sponsor block. Plus you can follow creators instead of channels, across platforms. And downloading a video means you can actually watch it without a connection too. It has more perks then someone paying for premium has. Piracy pais off.
This is the way.
Same, that combination never causes me any problems (I use uMatrix too which is always causing problems, but I get to decide which domains to allow cookies, scripts, and XHR requests from/to).
I'm confident its people using Chrome with Adblock Plus
I've had this issue where youtube is sort of breaking for me, but it shouldn't matter because I very begrudgingly pay for Youtube Premium.
(I'm not extremely tech savvy to the point where it's easy for me to set up a raspberry pi or whatever to watch youtube in bed on my tv OK?)
Anyways, sometimes it like, gets weird and the video player gets stuck at 0:00 and loops like 3 seconds of the video.
For quite some time now I've had the issue that the video simply refuses to stop playing requiring me to refresh the page. Might be an issue with one of the add-ons too though.
Didnt noticed it with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)
YouTube started throwing playback errors for me this last week on pc (Firefox with ublock and pihole).
I was able to get around it by opening links in a container tab without being signed in. New container for each link
Good riddance, I can't wait until I'm free from the instant gratification of videos by fancy ad vessels being narcissistic on the internet. The move to video and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I already use sponsorblock, ublock and dearrow alongside Vanced patches, piped and newpipe on mobile. Quitting YT is the next step.
It's happening because people allow it to happen. I recently unsubbed from a channel because they were beginning to use community posts to promote sponsors. Like a giant fucking post with complete BS like "I always wanted to do X video and now thanks to RAID SHADOW LEGENDS include huge pic it is now reality. Thank you RAID SHADOW LEGENDS and with code BullshitPromoFromYT you get 10% off the newest hat or whatever shit they sell in that game". Some people complained and asked the creator not to do this, but they were quickly flooded by the hordes of "they have to make money somehow"-drones. Despicable.
Libredirect and (self-hosted 😉) invidious is the way
Libretube, also amazing
Yep, they suddenly started doing that early this morning after several hours of playing videos just fine.
For a while, I've had problems with a patched yt app. Been going on for probably months at this point, but even with the latest ReVanced patches I still end up with, if lucky, video plays for 10 seconds before infinite loading. Makes me have to use the PipePipe (NewPipe fork) app more than I want, but at least I get ad free videos.
I'd use a privacy respecting frontend, but sometimes I like to comment and I have yet to find one that allows me to login and comment on videos.
I’d use a privacy respecting frontend, but sometimes I like to comment and I have yet to find one that allows me to login and comment on videos.
I'm not interested in commenting, but I do want to keep track of my history (across multiple devices). I wish there were a privacy-respecting solution that could do that.
By Louis Rossman's startup "Futo". I have a lot of respect for that dude from his right-to-repair activism, but despite that it's just a good privacy-respecting video app and worth paying for, IMO.
This is happening to me, on a minority of videos I click on, sometimes the video will start at random places midway through and even close to the end. Most times it doesn't happen tho (I am aware the videos start playing on the home/search page now, this isn't it).
I am using youtube premium tho, no adblock just their official app with premium on my phone. This problem started like one or two weeks ago max.
I'm surprised Google didn't try to push some sort of compiled javascript, to avoid examination, till now.
Web assembly ? It's not driven only by Google, but I think they have been involved.
I run uOrigin, flashblock, JS disabled, No Overlays, and DDG's privacy ad on's and I have no problems with YT
Did you just mention JS disabled on Youtube?
Not all of my Ad On's are for YT, but yes I run a JS blocker and also block video's and sound on all sites except YT
I'm not quite understanding what the benefit is to forcing skips to the end of the video. Having to click to the beginning of the video takes a fraction of a second which is still a better user experience than sitting through a 15 to 30 second ad.
Jokes on them, i stopped watching youtube videos years ago
Guys does this affect invidious instance? I recently moved to Tubular and I'm loving it. I just want to make sure it lasts long.
Lgeblock works great
Damn, I kinda don't care. Another day being happy that I know use piped so whatever YouTube does doesn't affect me.
Does anyone know an alternative YT app for BOTH Android phones and Android TV that allows for synched playlists?
PlayLet works for me.
Still workign for me. I'm using FIrefox in incognito mode, a VPN (I use a VPN for everything), and uBlock Origin.
I use dns.adguard.com on my android. Seems to work well over the past year and a bit. Seldomly things don't work and I need to switch it off but then back on once I'm done.
Doesn't block ads on YouTube though