Some users with adblockers installed have noticed that videos are skipping straight to the end all of the sudden.
  • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
    1992·
    6 months ago

    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).

    • Howdy@lemmy.zipEnglish
      89·
      6 months ago

      Had the random API one the other day. Was nuts. Also the 5 second delay for Firefox too when it was a thing.

    • Owljfien@lemm.eeEnglish
      35·
      6 months ago

      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?

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • KneeTitts@lemmy.worldEnglish
      43·
      6 months ago

      More and more Im trusting the fact that ublock origin will correct these issues in short order. Youtube must really hate those guys…

      • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        271·
        6 months ago

        Youtube must really hate those guys…

        Makes you wonder how long it will take, before Raymond Hill plummets to his death from a basement window.

        • Why9@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          6 months ago

          While the developer doesn’t accept donations, they do encourage donating to the people maintaining the block lists. I’ve contributed in the past and would happily keep doing so.

          It would be a shame if the devs maintaining the block lists stop doing what they’re doing because it’s not sustainable enough for them.

            • Why9@lemmy.worldEnglish
              28·
              6 months ago

              From this link:

              "I do not want the administrative workload that comes with donations. I do not want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for financial support. I want to be free to move on to something else if ever I get tired of working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).

              Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. I can not emphasize this enough."

  • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
    72·
    6 months ago

    Firefox with uBO, haven’t seen an add or ran into any issues in ages, both windows and linux.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      591·
      6 months ago

      Shhhhhhhh…don’t let the mainstream know…once EVERYBODY is doing it, they’ll fix it.

      Wait. This is Lemmy. Pretty sure there’s like 8 people here…

    • lost_faith@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      Sometimes I need to refresh the page for the video to play but otherwise no issues, ff+ubo ftw

      • Ænima@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        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!

  • Frellwit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    54·
    6 months ago

    Sounds like a bug in the filters used by Adblock and Adblock Plus. Afaik uBO or Adguard aren’t affected.

  • UncleGrandPa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 months ago

    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

    • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️@7.62x54r.ruEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      17·
      6 months ago

      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.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
          21·
          6 months ago

          I have my reasons. You may not agree, but you also don’t live in my house.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Think it’d be fixed by then if it was a fuck up

          Who knows. If it’s not impacting a signifigant percentage of viewers enough for them to complain it may not be a high priority yet.

      • vortexal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        I just tried that and it’s not working for me. MPV just closes itself and VLC gives me an error message. Do I need to do more that just drag and drop the URL?

        • rickyrigatoni@lemm.eeEnglish
          8·
          6 months ago

          For VLC you need to go to Media > Open Network Stream (or Ctrl+N), then paste the youtube link there.

          For MPV use command line mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videocode

          • vortexal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            4·
            6 months ago

            VLC still gives me the same error message.

            For MPV, it gives me the following error message:

            `mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw [ytdl_hook] ERROR: [youtube] 3e9_l2oGxdw: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred Failed to recognize file format.

            Exiting… (Errors when loading file) `

              • vortexal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                2·
                6 months ago

                Well, while MPV might be outdated, I already mentioned that I was able to get YouTube videos working by downloading a newer version of yt-dlp and creating a conf file for MPV that links to it. While I was looking into the problem, the versions available in apt for all three of these are outdated by at least a year, possible 3 years for MPV. I’m not sure if this is just a Linux Mint issue but I have noticed that a lot of the software both preinstalled and available in it’s repository, are pretty outdated.

                I might try downloading the newer versions of these later. I got MPV working and that’s good enough for me right now.

                • Frellwit@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  3·
                  6 months ago

                  Mint is known to use old software in its repositories as it’s based on Ubuntu LTS. The flatpak mpv should work though. flatpak install flathub io.mpv.Mpv and then run it with flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

                  If you don’t want to type flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv all the time, you can create an alias in your ~/.bashrc file. For example: alias play='flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv'. (After editing your bashrc file, run: source ~/.bashrc to activate the change). Then you can run it with play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.

          • vortexal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            I got YouTube videos working in MPV. While I have no idea if the way I did it was technically not correct, all I did was download the newest version of yt-dlp from github and created a file name mpv.conf which links to the yt-dlp python file. I was also able to set a preferred resolution using that conf file.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        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.

  • Phegan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • cannedtuna@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      6 months ago

      Yeah but I don’t really want to keep the videos. Need one of these alternative sites to hurry up and take off

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        I’d imagine there would be a way to automatically delete the file if you’ve watched a certain percentage and it’s been a certain amount of time.

        IDK, I’m not a programmer.

      • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        13·
        6 months ago

        I assume he’s asking because the EU has a bunch of laws that protects users from this kind of shitty behavior. When I went to the EU many of the apps I use became less shitty.

        • explore_broaden@midwest.socialEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          Does the EU actually have any laws that would prevent a company from doing whatever they want to try to fight ad blockers? I mean it would be really cool if they did, but I would be shocked if any government required a company not to try to prevent users from circumventing the way they make money.

          • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            I don’t know of any specific laws against them enshitifying adblockers. But there are things like the GDPR and in the EU big tech corporations are under constant scrutiny by regulators. Making them a lot less likely to do these kinds of shitty things in general. I assume that’s why she/he’s asking. Perhaps pressure from regulators has caused them to reframe from engaging in this same behavior in the EU? Out of caution?

            Edit: I use the modified version of the Youtube app on iOS (uYou) and the skipping behavior happened to me and it reminded me to respond to your comment. I’m pretty sure they’re breaking adblockers on purpose.

      • Atomic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        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.

  • r0ertel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • jaschen@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • Panda (he/him)@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        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…