I recently got my (via VPN) YouTube subscription cancelled and now I am wondering, if YouTube videos are findable in the usenet or using torrent tracker.
Does anyone already have experience with this? I block ads, but it seems not like a sustainable solution.
uBLock Origin seems to work well enough for me
I have been using Freetube since October of 2023 even know there are browser based blocking options. I just like it so much better. The only thing (and this is minor) that bothers me, is I fall asleep a lot of times with videos kind of running in the background and my laptop goes into ‘auto suspend’ after sometime. I normally have a linux terminal window in the background and I run a command to make it suspend after 45 minutes when I lay down. When I wake it back up I have to hit “ctrl + r” for a second to re-load the video other wise it does not like it. This is on top of the 10 or so seconds it takes my computer to wake up from suspend and get an IP address on my network again.
if you already have a vpn you can just tunnel through albania -> no ads.
Same with Morocco, no ads. At least it was a few years ago when I was there. Even downloading videos for offline playing was activated in the official YouTube app.
why dont they show ads in albania?
IIRC google adsense just doesn’t exist there yet.
Do you need an albaneese Google account too for that trick?
no, it just works :)
I’d recommend yt-dlp for downloads.
If you want to stream, you can use yt-dlp in combination with mpv,
OR
You can just install FreeTube if you want SponsorBlock as well.
I second freetube
It gets broken by YouTube API changes quite often, especially if you want to Tunnel through invidious, but they update quite fast and the experience is super smooth when working
You’re looking for yt-dlp
This is a godsend for downloads.
On mobile I use Seal. It’s yt-dlp packaged into an Android app
OK, yt-dlp is awesome. It does things even beyond YouTube exceptionally well. The whole downside is that not everyone is a data horder with the space for videos. If you don’t have a spare 5 tb , place the YouTube url into a Bing search - no ads, no login
The whole downside is that not everyone is a data horder with space for videos
Some media players allows for streaming directly using yt-dlp, e.g.;
mpv <youtube url>Will use yt-dlp if installed
+1 to this but also, If you’re on Linux, I’d recommend Freetube.
It’s on Flathub and allows you to use SponsorBlock.
Mpv has plugins that include sponsorblock, but freetube and others aren’t bad as well.
Freetube also runs on MacOS!
I use FreeTube a lot, but wow the quality difference is insane.
I had no idea. Thanks for this!
ETA: YouTube videos look 5x better like this.
Or use freetube, etc.
Why does blocking ads not seem like a sustainable solution?
Browser based ad blockers are great but Google (who manages the codebase for MOST browsers) has gotten better at keeping ad blockers off of Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
Long term solutions are things like a piHole or a VPN based ad blocker, but even those can cause issues if their filters are too strict (a bigger issue on something like that as configuration is often handled on another device).
For example, once upon a time the Microsoft website was completely inoperable with some ad blockers because the cdn that sends out their images and the like was also an ad server causing most things on their site to be blocked by apps like ublock origin.
Just wanted to add: Could also do DNS based ad blocking but Ublock Origin, (some) VPNs, and PiHole are awesome!
https://freetubeapp.io/ for watching, https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat for archiving
What problem to use yt-dlp?
Fear of Action on google’s side…
And wonky integration with sonarr
Would be way more convenient if YouTube content (especially kids shows) were available in the usenet. It is way more easy for my kid to navigate plex than YouTube kids, but the exclusive content there is needed for my kid to socialise better, I think.
You might want to check out Plasmatube if you’re on linux:
YouTube video player based on mpv, yt-dlp, and Invidious.
- Licensed under: GPL-3.0-or-later
