903
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
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...I'm sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
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.
What they should be imagining instead is a better video sharing platform. There are alternatives already...
Cause all you need is your imagination!
And billions of dollars to build and run the site with servers worldwide. No biggie
It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It'll be a UX hit, so it'll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can't stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don't require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
Look up HDCP.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I've never looked into this.
They aren't fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
Interesting, I had figured that was possible in principle but hadn't kept up with what was actually around.
But still, the HDCP stream is decompressed video, so if you want to save it, you'll have to either put it through yet another layer or lossy compression, or burn a ridiculous amount of disk space compared to the compressed stream that Youtube sent to your computer.
We'll see how things go. Google in the past has made occasional modest gestures to get in the way of downloading, but they haven't made serious effort to prevent it. Who knows whether that will last.
It's certainly not an ideal solution, but it's an option that will usually work.
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.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using
yt-dlp, and for a while YouTube required an account (which I will not get) from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
I'd just hop a vps around to different countries.
...I'd never do it here, admins, honest lol
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.
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.
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it's an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I'm quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven't seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they're working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
I would but my issue with that is that SponsorBlock doesn't work on downloaded videos.
Skytube has an option for clipping mid-video ads out of downloaded videos, if that helps.
I use SponsorBlock for more than just skipping sponsored segments. It's also useful for skipping intros, "like and subscribe" messages, and other general annoyances in most YouTube videos. Once you get used to it, you can't go without.
Same here. The SponsorBlock in SkyTube skips intros and "like and subscribe", too. Even in downloads.
Good to know, thanks.
Me too. I'm up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
I've been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it's made me paranoid ha