I need to understand how to block all ads within YouTube videos. I have both smart TVs and Fire Sticks at home, and I would like to know if I can block these ads using DNS. Currently, with basic configurations, it doesn't work, so I see all the ads
You really can't easily do it, as the youtube.com domains actually contain the ads (if you wildcard block these, you can't see the videos). And if you happen to correctly identify which specific youtube.com address contains one ad, it may effectively block that ad for now but will likely fail to work properly in a few days or hours as they are constantly playing cat-and-mouse with ad blockers.
There are 3rd-party adlists you can use in Pihole that may help for a time, but again, it is a moving target and often will either stop blocking ads there or will begin breaking basic functionality at YouTube.
Browser plug-ins, on the other hand, tend to work as expected for bypassing ads. These analyze content "on the fly" and don't depend on DNS lookups to deliver or block content. But you really can't use browser plugins on the equipment you listed.
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Probably not possible, because the ads are served from the same domains/subdomains as the content.
Definitely not possible. You can not block YouTube advertisements with Pi-hole.
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