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[Weaver]

I would love to get an ad-freedom subscription to YouTube but £16.99 or £15.99 or whatever it is? What on earth ! Compare that to Netflix's prices. I just cannot justify that. Maybe I could get one month’s worth but I would have to remember to cancel the subscription and that would be a worry.

[banger]

Free for me on Firefox with Ad-block plus, no ads.

[johnson]

Do you mean youtube red or whatever its called? Otherwise yeah, just install an adblocker... there must be good ones even for safari no? Ublock origin is what I use on firefox and chrome.

If adblockers on the ipads prove unsatisfactory then a new project should probably be a DNS based blocker for the network, like the pihole:
https://pi-hole.net/

[Weaver]

I think the thing is called "Red" in some countries although I did not see that marketing branding term on this occasion. I am thinking of adverts in the programmes btw, not images on the site.

I look at YouTube in the Youtube specific app on an iPad. I am not sure that it works using a normal web browser on iOS and it may be you have to use the app.

I have an excellent ad blocker for Safari, 1Blocker X, which is very powerful and customisable. It does not affect dedicated apps though only Safari.

iOS is very locked-down and ad-blockers are only now possible because Apple designed an engine (I think) and published an interface whereby ad-blockers can provide a database and drive Safari, from my best guesswork. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Safari does the blocking and the third party app tool tells it what to do and is responsible for the quality of the database. That way, I suspect, they have made it so that an ad-blocker can not screw Safari up or introduce bugs, slowness or battery guzzling into Safari's guts. Others who actually know what they are talking about will be able to deny or confirm this theory. (If this idea is right, it is vaguely analogous to the 'mini-port' or 'mini-driver' or whatever it is approach to device driver writing, and enforced.)

[Weaver]

The DNS thing would not necessarily work because I most of all want to surgically remove ads from in the middle of lectures and ads that delay you at the start, and I do not see that some of these are guaranteed to come live from different sources rather than having been integrated into the footage, but I could not say without some measurements.

[johnson]

Had a google, and it looks like the pihole way of blocking ads would be of no use when trying to remove them from a native youtube app:
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/issues/1988

Can you browse youtube in safari without using the app?

[Weaver]

Yes, I was wrong. Good point! I can indeed look at YouTube using Safari. I think the advent of html5 maybe has changed things?

I don't know about the adverts though, in any event the ad-blocker thing that I use works on matching patterns in html and could not recognise an advert that is a chunk of video of course. So whether or not it makes any difference is something to discover by experiment but I am not too hopeful. But of course here goes!

I really need the offline viewing thing that the app offers too, with a slow link. That way I won't be slowing my poor wife down when she is trying to get some important work done because I am watching a QM lecture, nor will my streaming video fail halfway through because of something that she unwittingly starts doing. And whenever possible, I download everything at night when it is 400 times cheaper, at £3.90 per TB download. So that is something very much worth paying for. But the ridiculous costs compared with NetFlix are totally bonkers.

[chenks]

i think you are getting confused with ads served by google/youtube and ads that are placed inside the video by the uploader.

the former you can easily block using adblockers - ublock origin, for example, blocks 100% of those ads.
the latter you can do nothing about as those are not ads placed on the video but rather they are part of the actual video made by the uploader.

youtube red is available in the UK (now called Youtube Premium), but that will only remove the ads that an adblocker would already remove, it wouldn't do anything about the ads that are part of the actual video.

[Weaver]

@chenks probably. I'm talking about 1. annoying ad clips that have a skip and countdown before the programme and 2. the occasional totally alien ad in the middle of a lecture

[chenks]

1 - adblockers remove those
2 - adblockers can't remove those are they are actually part of the video.

[Weaver]

Do you think 2 is surgery done by YouTube in the video just before it is stored for streaming?

[chenks]

no, this is done by the video creator.
video creators get sponsored to make a video and they insert the relevant "ad" into their video.

this is becoming more common now due to adblockers blocking the ads that youtube present during playback.

[j0hn]

I've never had YouTube randomly play any ads to me except at the very start.
Any decent ad-blocker removes these so you don't see them at all.

Any advert mid video would be added by the person who made the video. Can't say I've every come across this though.
I see plenty videos where they mention a sponsor but not a random ad randomly playing mid video.

If Safari doesn't allow extensions that do this then it can easily be done via DNS.

[chenks]

Any advert mid video would be added by the person who made the video. Can't say I've every come across this though.
I see plenty videos where they mention a sponsor but not a random ad randomly playing mid video.

it's becoming more common now as they creators know that youtube ads are mostly getting blocked now.

[Bowdon]

I've never seen any ads on youtube videos when I've used adblock plus.

I was looking to buy the youtube red, but they have the cheaper option for youtube music, and the regular option more expensive. When reading it I thought shouldnt that be the other way around, as most people come to youtube for videos not music.