- cross-posted to:
- google@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- google@lemmy.world
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”.
And revanced takes some steps, more than just “install this package, done”.
It depends. Personally I patch it and then share the patched apk with friends and family, so for them it’s literally just “install this package, done” without compromising security.
just make sure you either install it for them or let them know to only install this app not any app. getting them in the habit of installing any apk from email/text is bad news bears
I thought about doing this, but didn’t want to essentially be their maintainer. I do that enough at work lol
Tbh I share an apk twice a year on a shared Whatsapp group and that’s all the “maintaining” I do, so I don’t care that much. I’ve had worse
That’s fair. It’s more of when google breaks YouTube for the custom apps, that people start to get all pissy lol
not gonna lie, a little envious that your family knows how to install from apk, that would be my first bottleneck. They would hit the first scare screen and raise the white flag
I’d say they are objectively better, because are independent, free & open source apps, instead of relying on patching Google’s proprietary software.
They aren’t better IF you enjoy most of YouTubes features. Usability is key, and messing around with Revanced manager twice a year has been worth it easily.
Being OS doesn’t suddenly make worse UX better.
I appreciate your viewpoint, as it’s a part of what makes the software development community so great. I don’t necessarily agree with it, personally, since they all rely on proprietary backend (YouTube), but I truly do appreciate it.
I just don’t want any proprietary software on my devices (for many reasons, most importantly privacy and user freedom). I can use a VPN to privately connect to the YouTube backend, but things get much harder when the proprietary spyware is actually on my device.
I don’t disagree with this point. Calling them objectively better however, is not covering the whole story imo. They are objectively better if your goal is to deproprietarize (not a real word) as much as possible. But if your goal is to just block ads as seamlessly as possible while still keeping all other features in YouTube, then those FOSS apps drop to subjectively better.
Well yeah, I agree. FOSS apps do lack features like logging in (to a Google account), the recommendation algorithm, etc. On the other hand, ReVanced is not exactly easy to install for new users. Both approaches are valid and get the job done (blocking annoying ads). I appreciate the calm and pleasant conversation.
Which one of those do I pick if I actually want to be logged in and have Youtube keep track of my watch history, automatically synchronized between devices?
If you want to use YouTube for that, it seems like ReVanced is your only option. But you can also create an account on a Piped instance, and have your playlists synced. LibreTube is the only app that supports this.
Revanced with MicroG. I use YouTube 50/50 on mobile and Shield (SmartTube) and if my watch history, subscriptions etc. didn’t work, I wouldn’t be using it.
Pipepipe, its like Tubular but more reliable ime
Obligatory post mentioning that Freetube exists on Android as well. With Syncthing, I sync history, playlists and subscriptions. It’s brilliant.
I know that it exists, I don’t think it’s a particularly good solution on Android though. There are native apps like the ones I mentioned before.
Btw syncing an SQLite database with syncthing sounds painful. How often do you have to deal with sync conflicts?
Now do Android TV! All I want is to be able to allowlist channels for my kids but block everything else. I know an htpc is a better option but I’m lazy.
what’s the best way to get smartubenext/apks onto google tv with chromecast these days?
What’s the difference between smart tube and smatttubenext?
it’s the one after
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
SmartTube is so good. You get it for no ads; you keep it for all the dope features. It’s like YT way back in the day with more advanced shit for anyone that loves tinkering with all the fiddly bits.
This is my exact setup and couldn’t be happier with it.
iOS DID have Yattee, but it’s basically unusable at this point unless I’m doing something terribly wrong on my end. Every time I try to use it, even when signed in, I get errors no matter which back end I use.
It doesn’t work, because it relies on Piped/Invidious. Both are currently broken, because Google is trying everything to block third party clients/APIs/proxies for YouTube.
I use the Orion browser with uBlock Origin installed and get 0 ads on YouTube.
Brave can also block YT ads, but I’m not so sure about the extensions. If all you care about is blocking ads, brave is good enough. If you care about sponsorblock and many other FF extensions, Orion is probably way better.
I run:
Android: LibreTube
PC: Freetube (w/ Firefox redirect plugin)
AndroidTV: SmartTubeNext
This is literally the only way I will view content on YouTube.
Firestick: https://www.firesticktricks.com/
It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually had ad breaks instead of stopping my video mid sente… SHAVE YOUR BALLS WITH MANSCAPE… nce
This presents a good demonstration of what we can expect Alphabet / Google / Youtube to do if ever it should win its war on adblockers, or convince people to watch YouTube without vetting. Any time it promises to compromise and make a tolerable user experience, it will ratchet up advertisement plugs until it becomes intolerable.
This is why we can’t relent, ever.
This is why we can’t relent
What are “we” doing? Not uninstalling our ad blockers? Its not as though people are boycotting the site. Just use Piped, ffs. No ads whatsoever. It’s a late-00s YouTube experience.
We the public have to keep making better ad blockers that better detect ads and prevent them from being displayed (or in some cases, activating their malware payload).
YouTube is trying to either detect ad blockers and deny service, or change the insertion paradigm so that ads cannot be blocked. We cannot let them succeed doing either.
I would have omitted the last panel.
Yeah, it’s bad…… I didn’t feel like login into my premium account the other day and it was kinda much…….
I am hoping we get a Democrat to in office this year. With the balls(Well she technically does not have balls; but you get my drift) to break some FUCKING monopolies up. We need to break up Ma Bell again
Harris is married to the brother of an Uber executive. If you were hoping for a trust-buster, you picked the wrong candidate. Those $500k/plate fundraising dinners she hosts are coming entirely out of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaire bracket.
500k/plate…
How??? I’d genuinely like to know how one achieves this.
A $500k/plate dinner for a guy with $1B feels a bit like a $500/plate dinner for a guy with $1M.
I understand that but what would you serve on this plate, an apartment in new york city?
A money laundering coupon
what would you serve on this plate
A piece of paper with only a heading: “Insert lobby request here:”
And a footer: “Your business is important to us, thanks for supporting Democracy™”
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.
How did you get newpipe to work? It’s been broken for me for like the past 3 weeks.
Latest NewPipe 0.27.2 installed from F-Droid is able to play videos for me. But you might also try PipePipe or Tubular, which I mostly use these days.
It was broken for a day but there was an update on f Droid. Just installed that and it’s been fine.
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 just pay to make them go away.
Come on man, you’re breaking the echo chamber. We’re here to shit on Google, not give them more money
I’m happy he pays, keeps Google happy enough to not care too much about people who won’t.
Their user name is making me wonder if they’re a very subtle and clever novelty account
With my Argentine premium account I don’t see any ads…
Warum benutzen Sie ein argentinisches Konto?
… Interesting.
They’ve even started having “next” instead of “skip” so it just goes to another ad. But the worst is when it gives you an unstoppable 90 second ad roll, comes back to the video for all of 2 seconds and starts yet another 90 second ad roll.
If I want to watch YouTube on the bigger screen now, I just open it in Firefox on my VR headset.
i used to do this trick to skip ads on the tv app, where i’d go to the report section and click ‘return to video’ but i abused it too much so they took away the report button entirely for me :[
I’ve had it return from ads, make the video playback stutter. I refresh/reload or whatever, jump back in, get more ads, video playback stutter. It’s annoying as fuck
I have that issue when watching on Firefox (no matter the device). Always have to reload the video to get the frame rate back in sync otherwise it looks like it’s playing at sub 24fps making even a live action video look like the Spider-Verse movie animation.
Oh, this is on android yt app.
Pixel 8pro, so Google & Google.
There isn’t any variable that they don’t have control of.
Video playback after ads skips 500ms, plays 500ms, skips 500ms etc. Changing quality doesn’t fixing it. Play/pause doesn’t fix it, skipping doesn’t fix it. I have to fully quit YT app and restart it to get playback again, and chances are it starts the ads again.
Never had an issue on FF, w10 or Linux.I get that streaming video is expensive for bandwidth. And creators need an incentive to create.
I don’t expect it for free. I don’t YT enough to warrant a premium subscription.
The ads literally break the platform for me.
Makes sense to me to get into one of the alternative clients… But I don’t want to not pay my dues… It’s just not worth the £13 a month: there is no way I’m consuming that much content.
I wouldn’t mind them if they didn’t BREAK MY REMOTE’S PLAY BUTTON.
I was casting a video to my shield from my phone and ended up needing to pause for a phone call during an ad roll. Pausing worked fine but the play button on my phone was completely unresponsive after. Thankfully the shield remote still worked, but clearly play/pause during ads is handled differently than during normal videos and something is broken.
Any investors question would be, why did this take Google Youtube so long to implement such a feature, of course this is why the ads are being crammed like this on Smart TVs.
does anyone here use librewolf? for the past month or so YouTube has been completely fucked there. constantly freezing, sometimes pic only, sometimes fully as if my internet is slow, which it isn’t.
I’m suspecting they’re purposely fucking it for non chromium browsers but haven’t seen much complaining about it. i go back to Vivaldi for YouTube for now which works perfectly but soon enough the ublock will stop working.
does it happen to anyone? is it non chromiums? is it librewolf? is it just mine?
I’m using LibreWolf with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and NoScript where I selectively allow scripts and I never got an ad served on YT
Privacy Badger seems a bit redundant there
People keep saying this but test, it catches few things uBlock doesn’t and it allows you to control access level for these items as needed.
i don’t get ad served either, that wasn’t my question… but maybe it’s the script thing, i don’t have script blockers.
Oh, it’s sleep(5) all over again.
Firefox working fine for me
Yes. Noticed yesterday. I was even logged in to a friend’s YouTube Premium account. Loaded like I have slow internet.
Yep, when ive resorted to yt directly on librewolf it usually freezes/buffers and tab needs refreshing every 5-10mins or so of vid. Sometimes it’s ok. Pretty inconsistent. I use ublock and sponsor block with librewolf . Usually i use invidious or yattee, Which have their own issues also playing whackamole with the giant
based on another comment I’ll check out privacy badger and noscript; see if that helps
We are going back to the days of TV where half the time was spent watching ads!
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.
Agreed, but the word you want is perish, as parish relates to a land/area.
Hahahahaha!! Good catch! Fixing now
When I see you perish all I can think of is:
You are watching TV and hear a noise in a nearby room
PAUSE TV_
you pause the TV but to your dismay the TV plays an ad by a political candidate!! The sounds of the shadowy figure are drowned out
SHUT TV OFF_
whoops! Unfortunately for you this is a smart TV! And you need your phone to shut it off, it’s in the same room that the noise is coming from
RUN AWAY
You hear glass break.
…
Unable to pinpoint the location of your adversary, you are caught by surprise and bludgeoned by a steel bar and lay in a pool of your own blood. As your vitality seeps away through the hole in your fractured skull, you wonder the many outcomes that will never come to pass had you had YouTube Premium
You perish
START OVER? Y/N
You made it into a choose your own adventure template hahahahaha
That’s what years of Zork and other DOS text based adventures do to you… Oh and Shadowgate with its unfair trial and error bullshit
deleted by creator
This is actually pretty nice.
It’s much better compared then actually forcing you to watch something.
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.
Sadly, YouTube TV doesn’t include YT Premium.
Which is the weirdest shit imaginable to me.
In any case, adverts on the pause screen should be banned.
The entire advertising industry is long overdue for a massive clapback and course correction, because it has infested every inch of waking life.
I get it but how else do you expect them to be able to host all these videos and make them globally available? For free? Ad free? Private donations? It’s an incredibly useful service that for some reason people can’t stand to pay for.
I think the big reasons for most people boil down to one or both of two things:
A) People having 0 trust in Google. I.E. people do not believe that paying for their services will exempt them from being exploited, so what’s the point?
B) YouTube’s treatment of its content creators. Which are what people actually come to YouTube for. Advertisers and copyright holders (and copyright trolls) get first-class treatment, while the majority of content creators get little to no support for anything.
Then cut 4k content entirely. Downgrade to 720p.
Do what must be done. Run the company like it was intended to be financially feasible without some future advertising innovation saving it.
But once the product itself begins to actively repulse me, then I stop checking the website as much. Literally everyone I know right now in my immediate family and friend circle is looking or testing a Google alternative because of these reasons.
When you enshittify the experience too much, no one wants it. I have YT premium, but parents who have YT TV due to poor coverage in their area, they don’t get YT premium. I don’t understand that.
There is a give and take with advertising, you are right. But this is just beyond what I will tolerate. Pause screen ads and ads on my TV home screen are my line. That is my hardware, and that is a service I pay for. Absolutely not.
This is the right answer. If more people subscribed… Well, it wouldn’t have to be this way.