Tag: YouTube

All publicly hosted Invidious instances are blocked from playing YouTube videos. When you try the third-party solution right now, you receive error messages with no option to bypass it.

Note: this may impact other YouTube frontends as well.

Good to know: Invidious is an open source solution to play YouTube videos on publicly or self-hosted servers. All videos played come without ads or tracking, which is the main reason for users to use the service.

A message on the official repository of the service confirms that Google has shut down the latest workaround that it still had to play YouTube videos on Invidious instances.

Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.

Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.

The development team is not giving up, but admits that it might take months before another workaround is found.

Users may be able to use self-hosted instances to bypass the block according to the announcement, but there is no guarantee that this is going to work in all cases.

Invididious users who want to give it a try can check out instructions here. Note that this requires a fairly good understanding of the used technologies.

This is not the first time that YouTube managed to break Invidious. The main issue now is that the makers have no workaround anymore to bypass YouTube’s blockage.

While there is a chance that they find another workaround, it looks as if Google has won the cat and mouse game for now.

Have you used Invidious in the past? If so, what do you plan to do now? Feel free to leave a comment down below.

If you use the official YouTube TV app without a premium subscription, then you are in for another ad-treat.

Google has been testing Pause-Ads on YouTube since April of this year. These ads show up when you hit the pause button, e.g., to get something to drink or go to the bathroom.

Now, pausing will show an ad on the screen for more users. The following happens when you pause the video while using the official YouTube TV app.

• YouTube pauses and shrinks the video that is playing so that it occupies roughly two-thirds of the screen.
• An ad is loaded and shown to the right of it.
• YouTube displays a dismiss button and an info button next to the ad.

YouTube user RoÆther posted a screenshot of the experience on X:

There is also a report on 9to5 Google that shows another photo and a different ad.

There are other reasons for hitting that pause button. Maybe you would like to share your thoughts with someone else in the room, answer a phone call, or think about what you just saw.

Whenever you do, you will see an advertisement on the screen. Is it a disruptive experience? I’d say it is, as it changes the interface and displays new buttons on the screen. The ads do look static for now, though.

Reports suggest that Google is rolling out the change to more users.

YouTube is not the only platform that pause ads are making an appearance on. More and more ad-financed services may introduce pause ads to increase revenue generation.

As always, users have a few options to deal with ads on the platform:

• Subscribe to YouTube Premium, which offers an ad-free experience.
• Use a third-party YouTube app.
• Stream content from a PC with a content-blocker.
• Use a VPN connection to a country that does not have ads on YouTube.

Note: another interesting option is to search for the video on Bing Video. You may watch the video there without ads.

All in all, it is clear that ad-powered services are going to push ads harder and harder on YouTube. Google has been testing unskippable ads for instance, which make the experience even worse.

What is your take on pause ads? Would you mind, or is this something that you do not care about at all? Feel free to leave a comment down below.

If you use an app like SmartTube or NewPipe, you may have received error 403 messages when trying to play videos on YouTube recently.

This happened to me on two occasions in the past days. SmartTube was the app that I used on Amazon’s Fire TV Stick. I could browse YouTube and run searches, but any video that I tried to play returned a 403 error.

Note: An update fixed the issue on my end. Maybe this is also working on your end to get the issue resolved.

Whenever something like this happens, it is likely that Google-owned YouTube has made a change. Whether it is a deliberate change to torpedo adblockers or third-party YouTube apps, or something unintentional is not always clear right away.

This time, it appears, that Google seems to have made a change to block bots from accessing its videos. The information comes from the developer of NewPipe, who published details on Reddit.

Here is the summary:

• YouTube has been testing an anti-bot check on streaming URLs from its HTML5 clients for at least a few weeks.
• This added a new URL query parameter, which in turn caused invalid responses “after some time”.

The developer claims that the anti-bot check is “hard to implement” and that it “requires a full browser environment”.

Google furthermore has started to require the parameter on YouTube, which also resulted in 403 responses. Last but not least, Google rolled out a new JavaScript player, which turned out to be another cause for the experienced issue.

The developer’s analysis suggests that the changes that Google made this time may not have been aimed directly at users of third-party apps.

YouTube’s terms of service state that third-party apps may not block advertisement on the platform. It is likely that Google will continue its fight against content blocking and third-party apps that block ads. This time, it appears that it was likely just a side-effect.

The big question: if you could watch YouTube only with ads, would you? Would you pay for YouTube Premium to get rid of them?

The official way to watch YouTube videos without advertisement is YouTube Premium. The subscription-based service costs $13.99 per month in the United States if you sign up for a regular plan. If you pay annually, that price drops to about $11.66 per month. Students get it for $7.99 and there is also a Family plan for $22.99.

Google has made an announcement on its official support website recently. The company listed new YouTube Premium features and also hinted at the introduction of new plans.

Here are the new features:

• Jump Ahead feature on mobile to skip ahead. This is done with a double-tap and only available for Android at the time. Apple iOS support is coming “in the future” according to Google.
• Shorts Picture-in-Picture to watch Shorts while using other apps. Android exclusive.
• Smart Downloads to download “recommended Shorts automatically” to the device (experimental).
• Redesigned Watch Patch (experimental).

Most of the features are limited to mobile devices. Furthermore, some of them, especially the redesigned watch patch, are almost universally disliked by the community.

Google hints at new YouTube plans

More interesting than these features is Google’s announcement that it plans to expand “existing offers to more regions” and introduce “new plans” in the future as well.

Could it be that Google finally realized that the price of a YouTube Premium subscription is high if it is just used to watch content without advertisement?

YouTube Premium Lite appears to be a thing still, albeit heavily limited. It dropped the price of a subscription to about $6, but did not remove all ads on YouTube and did not provide access to YouTube Music or downloads.

Closing Words

While there are ways to watch YouTube videos without ads, I have to admit that I would be fine with paying a monthly fee for that. YouTube’s current premium pricing is over my monthly limit though. I do not use the service enough to justify the expense.

If YouTube’s upcoming plan or plans become reality, and if they are below my personal limit, then I’d certainly consider subscribing. In case you are wondering, my limit is $5 per month, preferably less than that if paid yearly.

What about you? Would you pay for YouTube Premium?

YouTube users who do not want to be pestered by ads on the platform have several options. The only official option is a YouTube Premium subscription, which is completely ad-free according to Google.

Problem is, you pay a premium depending on where you live. If you live in the United States, you pay $14 a month for YouTube Premium. This does get you access to YouTube Music, but not everyone needs that.

Look abroad, and you may notice that subscriptions are considerably cheaper in some regions. Users from India, for example, pay less than $16 per year for YouTube Premium.

It should be clear that Google is taking into account wealth differences when selecting prices for YouTube Premium. The per-capita income in India has been $2,050 as of 2023, which is considerably less than the United States 2023 per-capita income of $71,000.

YouTube users finding a loophole

Some YouTube users discovered that they can sign-up for YouTube Premium in a different country. This required the use of a VPN to get to the sign-up page of that country.

Sign-ups worked and users could access YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free afterwards.

Google did receive some money from these users, which some felt was still better than getting nothing. The use of adblockers prevents advertisement as well, and solutions do exist for all major platforms, including desktop PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.

Google fighting back

Reports suggest that Google is now cancelling YouTube Premium subscriptions for some subscribers.

No official confirmation: Google has not confirmed the crackdown officially.

The company told Techcrunch that it has systems in place that detect when a user’s country of origin and the YouTube Premium sign-up country are different.

Customers are asked to update their billing information in this case, according to Google.

Users claim that Google is cancelling their subscriptions outright. Some claimed that they were able to sign-up again using a VPN, but this is unconfirmed.

Closing Words

Google is already playing cat and mouse with adblocking users. It tests and implements changes to get adblocking users to stop using their content blocking extensions on YouTube or signing up for YouTube Premium. Adblockers do get updated quickly and the game begins anew.

It is possible that this is now extended to YouTube Premium subscriptions. Google cancels the subscription and users sign-up again using the same or a different account, in the same or a different region.

Some may also switch to using adblockers instead.

How much is YouTube without ads worth to you? That is a question that every user has to answer individually.

Stepify is a new online service that uses AI to create summaries of YouTube videos. The core idea behind the service is to create step-by-step instructions of tutorial or lecture videos. While that may be the intended use, it works with other types of videos as well:

• Top list videos: say, the top 50 music videos of the 90s, top 100 Sony PlayStation games of all time, or the top action movies of 2024.
• Hands-on videos, such as cooking videos or repair videos.
• News videos: get summaries of news videos. This works for financial reports and other types of reports as well.

How Stepify works

Stepify is simple to use. Just open the website of the service and paste a video URL into the field. It takes just a brief moment to get a summary of it.

The layout of the summary resembles a step-by-step guide, even if it is not one. This is not much a problem, as you can easily ignore the structure and extract the information that you want from the summary.

Several tests went surprisingly well. When tasked to create a summary of a top 25 Sega Saturn games video, Stepify did return all 25 mentioned titles.

Not only that, it also revealed why each game has been picked by the creator of the video.

Tests with other top lists and tutorial videos worked really well.

Some tests returned less useful information. When tasked to summarize financial videos, Stepify did return core information, but not all relevant information.

While that may still be okay for a first overview, considering that you get it in a matter of seconds, it is necessary to look up additional information for the full picture.

The developer explains on Hacker News that Stepify gets the transcript from an API and passes it on to GPT.

Closing Words

Stepify is an interesting service. It is free to use and works fast, even for longer videos. While it is still necessary to verify the returned information, it may help users get a quick overview of the content of videos.

It may also be useful to users who prefer text-based information over video.