Watching videos on YouTube is the favorite pastime of many Internet users. Those without YouTube Premium have to sit through ads before they get to see the video that they clicked on. The main way around this is to use an ad blocker.
Good ones block video ads on YouTube so that the actual video plays right away. Google is constantly tweaking and adjusting things on YouTube to make ad blockers less effective.
From displaying banners to users with ad blockers that they have to turn off the content blocker to watch the video to manipulation.
Reports emerged this month that Google may delay videos on YouTube for users of ad blockers. There is this thread on Reddit talking about the change and also one at the Brave forum.
All describe that Google may display “Experiencing interruptions?” in the lower left corner of the browser window on YouTube, if an ad blocker is used.
This delays the initial playback of the video by seconds, up to ten according to reports. Quick test in Brave confirmed that YouTube showed these on some videos that I tried to play. The delay was not as large, maybe a second or two for all the videos that showed the notification.
The issue is not limited to a single browser or a single content blocker. Brave is affected, as is uBlock Origin in Firefox. Updates seem to have fixed the issue for some time, but the issue seems to have reappeared.
There is not really a fix for that at the time of writing. If you are affected, you may have to wait until the filter lists get updated or the issue resolved in another way. Still, even with the delay added, it is not as bad has having to sit through the video ads that YouTube displays when you turn off your ad blocker.
The only other solution that I can think of is to download the videos instead and watch them this way.
Now You: do you watch videos on YouTube? Did you notice the delay in the past couple of weeks?
I rarely watch yt videos but I always download them first then watch them with vlc simply because they won’t play in my browser because of my privacy settings.
I’m not in the situation of experiencing what is described in this article.
@Martin > “The only other solution that I can think of is to download the videos instead and watch them this way.”. Maybe an alternative is a “mixed-grill” approach :
I search for YouTube videos and access channels and playlists via either an Invidious either a Piped instance and redirect the video links they provide to [https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/VIDEOID]. Most Invidious and Piped instances are for the worst KO regarding the retrieval of YouTube videos, yet several remain totally functional for retrieving channels’, playlists and user search links.
No advertisements, no cookies, videos displayed quasi instantly.
No delays with FreeTube. No delays with NewPipe on Android.
Side-note regarding YouTube videos …
@Martin, maybe a new YouTube “feature” which is arguable:
I’ve discovered that some (many, all?) YouTube videos have their audio AI-processed to another language than original. I believe it is AI-translated to the browser default language spotted by YouTube servers.
In my experience, browser default language is US-en.
I came across this video : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iAxoHeyGuo]
The video is originally in French, its channel is : [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGWoTWsXJi1UtCjOiBHIsfw]
I check the same video on two YouTube front-ends and the audio is in French :
[https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5iAxoHeyGuo]
[https://youtubenuker.lol/watch?v=5iAxoHeyGuo]
I was surprised, especially that the AI-processed audio which brought French to English is not very well done (appears as a poorly driven playback, you can perceive a lack of perfect synchronization between the lips and the audio).
Now i discover a userScript which aims to disable this YouTube AI Audio :
[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/540430-yt-disable-ai-audio]
I’ve tried it but it did not work here.
@Martin, #everyone, are you aware of this YouTube AI Audio, have you experienced it, do you have any pertaining info regarding it?
Downloading can be problematic too. I usually use yt-dlp.
1. Sometimes works
2. Sometimes tells you to log in first
3. Sometimes produces errors like forbidden or not available
@angst
That is likely due to youtube not allowing guests or non logged in users to view anything without being a registered user and complying with age requirements. Once you log in with your yt-dlp frontend or whatever (provided it has been updated for that as many of them are now) then you shouldn’t have that problem. Assuming you have not already tried that.
In regards to the entire article this has been an issue for me for a while when I rarely visit youtube through the website which is only when I am creating and submitting sponsor segments skips for sponsorblock.
Google has long since used yt as a leveraging tool to push people to chrome and conveniently they try their best to prevent you from blocking ads or downloading videos from youtube and control everything you do whilst also datamining you.
In summary…
Google… always evil!