Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

ericdraken.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 659 posts

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#331

Post by quickthrower2 »

Shekelphile wrote: post #207
guerrilla wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're not going to leave money on the table. Eventually you'll be seeing ads too. This is just a hook period. I don't understand how we as a culture haven't learned this already. This is at least the fourth or fifth generation of this with media. How things actually work should be common sense by now.

It seems to me that all of google's most successful services (search, youtube, gmail and gsuite, maps/earth, android) are next to impossible to monetize profitably and have significant utility to the general public. It feels like these are services that governments should be building and funding themselves. Youtube specifically has a plethora of useful information made by normal people. You can find hundreds of thous…

I trust (with regards to privacy, censorship and bias) governments even less than Google to be honest.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#332

Post by BoppreH »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #318
BoppreH wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I already support my favorite creators in other ways. Because I'll still see ads when I use other devices. Because videos have extra ads in the form of sponsor segments. Because ads are a parasite on society. Because their lying and psychological manipulation should be illegal. Because most of this tracking and privacy invasion mania is the ad industry's fault. If there's a new product useful for me that I sh…

But who pays for the medium? Someone needs to. And YT offers an alternative where you can be the customer not the product.

That's a good question, and I think we haven't explored alternative solutions enough.

As for me, I'm happy to pay for Netflix, Nebula, my VPN, and other services. I still pay, but I'm disappointed in Spotify, who is pushing more and more soft ads even on supposed ad-free plans.

But a YouTube Premium subscription would be financing this ad machine and the decisions that come with it. Have you watched Shorts? No thanks.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#333

Post by montroser »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #228
moonchrome wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Google if you want to promote alternatives. Otherwise you're just rationalising freeloader behaviour.

Oh no, don't get me wrong, I'm not _rationalising_ freeloader behaviour. I'm saying Google _deserves_ to have freeloaders milking them for every bit they can. So does Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon...

And it's just a convenient consequence of doing the "morally right" thing, that you happen to get your content for free? And content creators be damned?

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#334

Post by throwaway2037 »

ben_w wrote: post #140
jjallen wrote: post #122

I just subscribe to YouTube premium to support my favorite application out there. I learn so much from the people who spend hours and hours making videos every month that I am more than happy to pay a measly $13 or whatever it is every month to YouTube.

If the ads were silent banners changing the aspect ratio of the videos, I wouldn't mind them. 30 second un-skippable advert to see a 7 year old 45 second clip? I press "back" and watch neither. Thinking of supporting creators: I looked at Nebula a while back as an alternative; I think there was some UX issue back then, but they've likely improved it and I should look again.

    If the ads were silent banners changing the aspect ratio of the videos, I wouldn't mind them.
This is an interesting idea. It is already used to some extent in live football matches broadcast on TV. The sidelines have their ads replaced. I think your idea is a good one and deserves some testing by Google/YouTube.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#335

Post by danbruc »

elif wrote: post #265

[flagged]

Watching ads pays for nothing, buying stuff where the price includes a fraction of the ad budget of the company pays. Even when I am blocking ads, I still buy stuff, I still contribute to ad budgets, my money still gets spend on some ad campaign and ends up in the hands of some creator or whatever. At worst I will somewhat skew the way the money gets distribute by blocking ads, but that is something I am willing to accept in order to not get distracted, annoyed and tracked.

If possible, I would happily pay a reasonable amount every month to get rid of all ads everywhere even though I would essentially be paying twice, ones with the monthly payment and I would still pay for part of the ad budget with everything I buy. But this is currently not possible anyway and getting individual subscription everywhere - if even possible - will cost you an unreasonable amount and make deal with countless subscriptions unless you are a person only using a hand full of different sites.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#336

Post by aquova »

elif wrote: post #265

[flagged]

> I don't get why people block ads on YouTube, robbing individual creators. It's not like hulu or Amazon where you are just robbing megacorp and predatorial studios.

The greatest trick Google ever pulled was getting people to rationalize their ad campaign like this. They place the independent creators in front of themselves, so that blocking ads doesn't hurt the largest advertising company on the planet, it hurts the little creator who you're personally invested in. The honest truth is that if I had my way, all advertising would be gone from the internet. Yes, I understand the repercussions of that, but I view advertising and the implications of advertising to be a huge net negative, and I have no interest in being forced to watch any.

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#337

Post by rpastuszak »

jjallen wrote: post #122

I just subscribe to YouTube premium to support my favorite application out there. I learn so much from the people who spend hours and hours making videos every month that I am more than happy to pay a measly $13 or whatever it is every month to YouTube.

I pay, I support the creators I enjoy and I’m still force-fed ads pushing the stuff I don’t need, via sponsored content.

We deserve butter! https://butter.sonnet.io/

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#338

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

thegeomaster wrote: post #203
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a CF employee but I am pretty sure it's working as intended as they built and use this: https://github.com/cloudflare/mitmengine

Use this to evade it: https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate Greetings from a country whose (almost) entire IP space is blacklisted by Cloudflare!

Wow thanks, I was looking for this exact piece of software a few weeks ago when testing against some geo restrictions

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#339

Post by syntaxing »

soma8088 wrote: post #276
drt5b7j wrote: post #257

A few years ago pihole was all the rage. What happened? I'm genuinely asking what are the difference between the two approaches and when is one better than the other.

Pihole is still a wonderful application. I use it on my home network. One drawback that the pihole has vs pfSense is pihole cannot do anything about devices that have hard coded DNS ips (aka 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 etc).

The hardcoded issue is more of a consumer router limitation than a pihole issue. Any router that can redirect DNS request + dnsmasq can do what pf-blockerng does. You just don’t see it since pfsense does this in the background. All my ubiquiti stuff or Opnsense uses pihole fine with hardcoded DNS including chromecast (I use NextDNS instead of pihole but essentially the same thing).

Re: Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

#340

Post by kyrra »

issafram wrote: post #329
thegeomaster wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use this to evade it: https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate Greetings from a country whose (almost) entire IP space is blacklisted by Cloudflare!

Which country?

From his profile:

> Software engineer from Belgrade, Serbia

Post reply on HN