How do I block ads on YouTube?

hey,

  1. Open YouTube , click on the profile picture at the top right corner of the screen.
  2. Go to Creator Studio.
  3. Click the “Channel” button from the menu on the left.
  4. Pick “Advanced” from the drop-down menu.
  5. Uncheck the box saying “Allow advertisements to be displayed alongside my videos.
    hope this helps you.

Ive been using it for about 12 hours of YouTube and unfortunately it blocks some normal youtube videos from loading. Have you thought of a fix?

@zeeb & @redd, I'm working on a solution to detect and unlock address of the main video for the next release.

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If you manage to get this working as intended, it will be a game changer!

Let me know when its ready :smiley:

Done !

I published a new release (v1.3.0) with an "unlocker" mechanism.
If your video is blocked, you just need to reload it.

GitHub link

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I just notice an open ticket showing install troubles.

Should I wait before attempting to use this or is it generally though that it will work ok?

Here was everything good in raspbian fresh installation

I was also able to install v1.3.0 with no issue.

I figured id give it a go.

My youtube videos on my phone just dont load.
Even when I attempt to reload them, they just dont seem to load at all.

When I look to see what the logs suggest is happening
"tail -f /var/log/ads-catcher-blacklister.log"

I dont see any updates :confused:

Can anyone suggest where I am going wrong?

Small update.

The problem seems to be worst on the iPhone youtube app. It is really struggling to load any videos.

On the PCs, it seems to catch the onscreen ads, but it is not catching ads at the beginning of the videos.

I will leave it to run for a few days and see how it goes.

I think tomorrow I'll have time to do new batches of tests with Youtube app on multiple devices to try to reproduce a deadlock.

It's not abnormal, if there is no new address to block, you will not have new entry, Just a line like this (every 10 minutes) :
[Sat 20 Apr 23:28:24 BST 2019] ads-catcher-blacklister

I’m having mega trouble with it blocking videos.

Reloading them doesn’t seem to help. Do you have any tips I can try to resolve this?

First time it ran, it completely blocked all videos from loading. Pi-hole was showing that all videos were being blocked via the blacklist, and this is on both Google Chrome and using the YouTube app on a Roku device. Once I removed the googlevideo domains from the blacklist, the videos worked again. The workaround isn't working, re-launching the video several times doesn't change anything.

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This is similar to my experience. Reloading the videos doesnt seem to get things moving.

I am keeping it running to see if over time it gets better.

I am noticing that the intro advert for many videos still seems to load almost 100% of the time.

It could still be that it needs to continue learning so ill keep it running for a few weeks to see how it progresses.

Thank for your feedback, it's precious.

I did lot of tests yesterday, I had problem with one video on a smartphone :

  • youtube app used 5 different addresses for one video
  • blacklister added blacklist addresses while unlocker removed them from the blacklist
  • history list of the unlocker was erased too quickly
  • unlocker is to slow when lot of requests are made (youtube and others)

I did changes (not pushed for the moment), I'll try to see If I can reproduce this situation (really not easy on my side).

Yes, as planet said, you can uninstall ads-catcher and remove youtube addresses for the blacklist file (pihole interface or directly in the file /etc/pihole/blacklist.txt)

Would you be able to test it on the YouTube TV app? Seems to be deployed quite similarly on Smart TVs, Roku devices, Gaming Consoles, etc.

I also have slow/bad internet here (3 megabit download speed) which may also play a role. But I noticed the TV app using the same googlevideo domains for multiple videos, so when blacklisting the domains, the TV app and website on my laptop had a lot of trouble loading videos.

Hey planet, how do you run the deb file on raspberrypi? Can I just install it from the desktop GUI ? Thx

What deb file is this?

It’s a script but downloaded as deb

Yes I can, I'll check with my TV.

Yes, two ways with a Desktop GUI :
1- if you have a default application to manage deb files on your system, you can launch it by doing a double click or right click > open
2- you can launch a terminal from the menu