Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
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I've got 500Mb fiber internet and YouTube refuses to stream above 360p unless i manually change it. Which each update becomes harder and harder to do as they hide the video quality button somewhere else.
If you use Firefox:
Video Quality Settings for YouTube (HD/4K) – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
Download Video Quality Settings for YouTube (HD/4K) for Firefox. Watch YouTube in your preferred video quality, such as 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 2160p.
(addons.mozilla.org)
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I mean, you don't need anything; it'll work with no flags. I have these:
$ cat ~/.config/yt-dlp/config --embed-subs --embed-metadata --embed-chapters --embed-thumbnail --sponsorblock-mark=all $
That'll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
Note that subtitles doesn't include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --write-auto-subs in conjunction
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Nah. How would you crack down a program that just play the videos in the background and then just capture the content while it's played?
Just queue up a bunch of vidoe you wanna watch, and let the program just essentially screen record it.
Well if you say "DRM"? Well we could share it to a display that itself is hacked and record all the signals.
Unless they are doing proctoring as if it were a test, there will always be some way to circumvent it.
Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
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Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
I'm so used to the sponsorship thing that I just instinctively tap/click the right side of the screen a few times to skip it.
(As for why I don't use sponsorblock: I don't block them because I wanna take a few seconds to take a peak into the sponsor segment to make sure they don't have very evil sponsors like ahem "Betterhelp" (I don't trust someone that still have that as a sponsor in 2025)
Edit: Also, I'm pretry sure someone will build a locally run AI model that can detect the ads/buffering and cut it out. "AI" might not give you true information in terms of search results, but pattern recognition is like its main job, right?
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Good, kill your product
I use adblockers, but I'm confused how this would hurt google if people using adblockers stopped using youtube.
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I can't tell an honest difference between 1080p and 720p from across a room. On a monitor, sure, but I grew up in the 90's. Anything 480 and above is tolerable to me.
I'm pirating it, should I demand my money back for poor service? Lmao
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I've been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me "ad blockers aren't allowed" at work where I'm forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.
uBlock Lite is simply not as potent, so it's understandable it can be beaten. Almost like Google is abusing their monopoly
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If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp
, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they're likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but...Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I'm that level of anal
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Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
Imagine adblock re-rencoding software that picks mp4s clean based on repeated content(ads). The user could select each ad as they happen, mark them as such and let it identify them from there. Imagine sharable or federated caches of these ad records between users.
Someone who can code, please, imagine it.
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theoretically anything is possible so what
Right. At the end of the bullshit, the content still plays to completion if the user hits play. We can script and Ai and remove ads all day long after a program snags the feed.
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My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
I'd just hop a vps around to different countries.
...I'd never do it here, admins, honest lol
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Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
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I'm a filthy Windows user that's too lazy to migrate my main PC to Fedora.
> Path\to\yt-dlp.exe -P <target directory> <URL>
Multiple URLs can be separated by spaces. Put any URLs with ampersands in quotes or remove the ampersand and following arguments.
You can find a list of all the arguments on the yt-dlp github page
FYI, ampersand is the "&" symbol. Not sure if your post is missing them or if you meant the angle brackets. Not trying to be pedantic, just trying to be helpful.
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Like it or not, YouTube still has a fuckton of good, informative tutorials and advice on how to fix things or make things made by individuals with a phone camera and no script, who make them not for money but for the pride in sharing their knowledge. I shared some fix it videos for my van and a very obscure phone, and consumed a lot of fix it videos for washing machines, motorbikes and furniture.
This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can't afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There's countless other anecdotes like that over the years.
This is what sucks so much about Google's monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible
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If you use Firefox:
Video Quality Settings for YouTube (HD/4K) – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
Download Video Quality Settings for YouTube (HD/4K) for Firefox. Watch YouTube in your preferred video quality, such as 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 2160p.
(addons.mozilla.org)
I'm don't having a functioning computer right now because i can't afford even a used one. I'm just using the YouTube app on ny phone or tv
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HA! Jokes on them! I'm running a budget dell PC from 10 years ago! The PC itself is slower than any delays they cause! I'm talkin' 3-5 minutes to load each video. Sometimes the whole PC freezes, and you need to unplug it. Sometimes the browser crashes right at the end, so you gotta relaunch the browser, and then wait 20 minutes for all the tabs to populate. Then you gotta end task on all the individual windows. Then you gotta reload just the tab you're looking at, and THEN you can wait 5 minutes again.
You think I'm even going to notice your 10 second delay?
I know times are hard, but you could build/find a PC for <$300 that doesn't run that badly. Hell, even a ~$150-200 tablet would be way better than that.
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Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I'm that level of anal
I'm not really following video DRM, but my understanding is that Widevine won't run in a VM with a virtualized video card like that.
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Note that subtitles doesn't include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --write-auto-subs in conjunction
Thanks.
EDIT: There isn't an
--embed-auto-subs
, but there is a--write-auto-subs
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Ublock origin (if your using it) "fixed" the issue shortly after. Im convinced someone at google works on adblock lol. Probably not true but the timing was really fast.
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