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.
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
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
That’s fair. It’s more of when google breaks YouTube for the custom apps, that people start to get all pissy lol
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’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.
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.
Pipepipe, its like Tubular but more reliable ime
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is my exact setup and couldn’t be happier with it.
I run:
Android: LibreTube
PC: Freetube (w/ Firefox redirect plugin)
AndroidTV: SmartTubeNext
This is literally the only way I will view content on YouTube.
what’s the best way to get smartubenext/apks onto google tv with chromecast these days?
Firestick: https://www.firesticktricks.com/
They have actually started serving ads with a skip button… That only skips to the next ad.
That’s been a thing for years now like back before I got premium which was at least 4 years ago the skip button would skip the first ad and then bring you into a timed ad afterward that you couldn’t skip, was obnoxious as hell
I got premium
Don’t expect things to improve after happily paying consecutive ransoms.
it’s improved for me, as someone who easily watches 20ish hours of video a week It’s worth it for me to not have to deal with all the hassle of ad block on it. I run a pihole for everything else but the cat and mouse game got old. I currently get my money’s worth, but if it raises much further I’ll cancel.
Not “if” but “when”. They have you and million others on the hook and already plan their next step to extract more money from you.
yea and when that happens I just cancel, then I can worry about all the ad blocking and stuff, but currently it’s worth it for me
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.
Thats why i have a dumb tv with a little linux pc attached to it, so i can open piped and jellyfin in my librewolf browser.
Tell me more, pretend I am in idiot…how do I do this?
- Go to <insert distro>.com
- Download iso
- burn iso to usb stick (ventoy!)
- install on pc
- install ublock origin on firefox
- done
also get a dumb tv ofc
edit: despite what people will say, ubuntu is still a rock solid distro. Alternatively, tumbleweed is brilliant too.
You don’t need a dumb TV, just switch the input. If your TV shows ads when connected to other inputs, yeet that TV out of your house today.
Disconnect it from your network. Hard to serve ads if it can’t contact the servers it is pulling them from.
Got a new TV a month ago. Fucked up and connected it to wireless, no idea what I was thinking. The only way to kill the connection (from the TV side) was a factory reset.
Windows is like that now. Once you enter an internet connection, you’re screwed. No way out but a full reinstall.
Yup, working on setting up VLANs so I can keep the stuff I like (DLNA from the NAS) without the stuff I don’t (ads).
despite what people will say, ubuntu is still a rock solid distro. Alternatively, tumbleweed is brilliant too.
real!! just do the thing to disable snaps and it’s perfect for anyone
EDIT: actually turns out snaps have gotten really good lately, ubuntu is still great!!!
I disagree. Native packages are still a bit more hassle-free, but snaps have gotten really good by now. And you can do some things that debs can’t, like setting up an entire nextcloud installation with a four-words-long terminal command.
huh, cool i didn’t know that!! i havent heard much news of snaps except for when they first came out and were kinda shit lmao
Set up a mini PC like a used Lenovo ThinkCentre, install Linux, and add a keyboard with trackpad. Run Jellyfin and Piped on your homelab, then ‘obtain’ media for your Jellyfin-Instance. Enjoy TV without distractions or tracking!
Follow ups,
Whats the trackpad for?
Any guide on jellyfin setup?
Also homelab 😂😂
Keyboard+trackpad so you can sit on the couch and have keyboard+mouse controls on the TV.
Trackpad: Because i decided to not go with anything like kodi, i need a mouse and as i can not use a mouse when sitting on the couch i got a keyboard with integrated trackpad.
Jellyfin: There are a hole lot of guides on jellyfin. Just put it in to youtube and you will find plenty of stuff. The only thing is ‘obtaining’ the media to fill your library. There are a lot of ways and it depends on what language you need your content to be in to make any decision.
Homelab: Well if you want to run anything like piped or jellyfin you need a homelab. This could also be just a RaspberryPi. To get Piped with subscription feed running you can use my guide: https://gist.github.com/WreckingBANG/405235949c655cd8246188ba25c42277
You could also use Chromecast with SmartTube. Works like a charm. Let me know if you need help with it.
Its not opensource tho, so you are still getting google tracking.
Sure, it was only meant as a way to circumvent ads on the TV
Are you me? Except I use FreeTube instead of Piped. I am so happy with this solution. Years of discontent of watching services going through the enshittification cycle… everything just becoming so underwhelming. This has given me back freedom over my own media consumption. No ads. No endless scrolling through bullshit content. Just a nicely personally curated selection of movies and TV shows (on Jellyfin) and an ad-free YouTube-experience with sponsorblock and dearrow enabled, and blocking of live chats and shorts.
what model? im looking into getting a dumb tv myself but havent found anything good
Well its just old sony tv and i am looking for a replacement with better quality and it is pretty hard to find anything. I will probably just go with a smart tv and never connect it to the internet. You can hack samsung TVs to jump straight into a hdmi input so i will probably do that even tho i am not happy with it.
Not only is this true and annoying, but other things about the ads are getting worse, too.
I recently had to factory reset my TV and, after the first time I opened the YouTube app, immediately had to find the “don’t play video preview” option. It worked, except for the huge banner ad at the top of the list of videos, which still saw fit to play with deafening sound when I didn’t immediately change the video selection. I can’t find a setting to disable this.
Also, I’ve noticed the “fewer ads for this long video” message popping up during videos longer than thirty minutes (and now it seems like longer than twenty minutes). Not only is that message condescending like they’re doing me a favor, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true, at least not by much; and the ads are definitely longer and mostly unskippable.
Like someone else says in this thread, it feels like extortion.
Try this, if your TV can run it: https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ No ads, and there is even sponsor block included, so you don’t have to hear the annoying „segue to our sponsor“ and „please like and subscribe“ nonsense.
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
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
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?
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™”
A money laundering coupon
Black mirror is getting closer everyday
Speaking of which, anyone notice the hellishly annoying full-screen shitty mobile games Netflix keeps front-paging?
Seriously considering just giving up on the service and going entirely to piracy.
I experienced this crazy onslaught of advertising to the point of reducing how much I watched YouTube. I was pretty upset and not at all inclined to pay, especially since YouTube was even putting ads on my own videos without me seeing a single cent, because my channel is too small.
Then my partner bought me a few months of a Premium Subscription as a Christmas gift.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Combined with background music on mobile, it’s changed my life.
I’m still unimpressed with the business model, but the alternative is so far worse.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.
To me this is way too much like extortion. The more they do this the less I want to give them money.
Also I need to be logged on everywhere, which I don’t want to (have to), mostly for privacy and data harvesting reasons.
It also does not help that when I want to see something and jump around in a video, I get the same ad 30 times. No exaggeration.
It absolutely is.
It’s possibly also how they’ll get broken up by the DoJ.
The thing is… All the premium features USED TO BE FREE AND AVAILABLE UNTIL THEY LOCKED THEM BEHIND A PAY WALL.
I used to be able to have YouTube playing in the background, reduced ads, etc. All of the features.
Now, I still do because I use Firefox + ublock on mobile. Yeah, I can play this shit with my screen off (Firefox + unlock + desktop mode + turn screen off).
Fuck 'em.
It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.
Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.
My problem is that I don’t really want Google – a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining – logging and data-mining everything I watch.
YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it’s not buying any kind of no-log service – in fact, it’s just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That’s not the service that I want to buy from Google.
What I’d be willing to get from Google is a “no log” service.
I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I’m fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data…but I want part of that service to be that they aren’t logging what I do and data-mining my data.
I don’t like the model of “we don’t charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can”. I’m fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn’t what I want for myself.
I think that every single provider tracks your activity and the vast majority of them use it to optimise their service income from you, either by giving you better engagement, ie. making you use the service more - endless searching for content for example, or by selling the captured tracking data to the highest bidder.
Not Kagi if you believe their privacy policy. I believe them and have been loving Kagi for like a year now I think. I made the switch long ago and it’s so good I forgot about Google search.
Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.
Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.
Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.
No offense to nebula (I’m rooting for them) but unless you exclusively watch news and educational content it basically has nothing to offer. I tried it for a year and I ended up barely using it because I don’t watch that type of content.
Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.
Don’t forget the benefit of being able to spite Google!
The lifetime access option shouldn’t exist for an app like that, not unless they have another primary form of income (usually ads). That type of service costs a lot of money to host and if you have a user base that does a one off purchase you stop having a good chunk of that income relatively fast
That’s just the main red flag I see from that, I would be super hesient starting on a platform that isn’t self sustaining and doesn’t have a parent company willing to chuck money at it “till it works” like Google did
I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.
Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.
I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.
I agree that it’s a great investment, and it will definitely get people on board for if the platform really takes off. I think they’re definitely assuming that the majority of their people who pay the $400 aren’t going to remain on the platform which is probably a safe bet, once they get somewhat established and have content that’s more for the everyday person, I would probably recommend converting the lifetime license over to an extended long-term subscription.
So like a subscription that lasts five six years at like the price of 3 years of the monthly subscription price, I know if YouTube offered something like that I 1,000% would buy it in a heartbeat because I know that YouTube will still be around in that time frame and it’s a no-brainer cuz I use it daily,
That being said if they did end up having a significant amount of people that are still using the lifetime subscription, they may revert to adding features to the monthly subscriptions like how Discord does that entice you to switch to a new plan with a retroactive sub and then you just can’t switch back again.
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’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 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 :[
Didnt noticed it with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)
This is the way
I’m going to show this real quick and then we’re going to move on, so pause the video if you want to take a closer look…
Phone: rings
Me: “better pause Youtube so that I can answer without noise in the background”
Youtube: plays ad with even louder audio
Me:
Better switch to some horror film murder compilation video before answering the phone. At least I know it’s going to be all screams and blood splattering on the walls while I’m talking on the phone.
A bit of a PSA for LG owners running webOS:
I rooted my tv and now have adless youtube, but apparently root is not a prerequisite - there also installation using dev mode. Admitedly, haven’t tried it and it’s probably less convenient to get it set up, but then it should be a one time thing.
I’ve got an LG C1 and have been using homebrew with Dev mode for a while now.
Can confirm it is very easy to do if you have a basic tech knowledge base.
The only inconvenience is sometimes after updates it will delete the homebrew apps but its a 5 minute job to get them back and ive only had it happen probably 3 times over a year.
“Youtube no ads” - the homebrew app, works flawlessly as if it were the original app with all of your subs etc but every now and then a tiny banner comes up begging me to subscribe to premium which I actually love because I can keep telling them to fuck off. The frequency of the little banner is probably once every few times you open the app and its non-intrusive.
Overall the LG dev mode trick with the Youtube No Ads app has been the cleanest and most enjoyable out of the box experience compared to alternative frontends etc.
I have an LG with WebOS and have youtube premium and haven’t seen any ads so far (though it may be regional). Cheers for the link, tough. I wonder if it works on Japanese versions
Firefox + uBlock = Ad free experience
Youtube on TVs
Media PCs for the win!
I bought premium just because it was annoying that my wife viewed ads while doing her makeup in the morning…
You sound like you enjoy watching your wife getting penetrated by more than just ads, if you really did pay YouTube
And Smarttube Next on the TV/firetv/Android TV.
