742
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
742 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
71582 readers
3576 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Nah. How would you crack down a program that just play the videos in the background and then just capture the content while it's played?
Just queue up a bunch of vidoe you wanna watch, and let the program just essentially screen record it.
Well if you say "DRM"? Well we could share it to a display that itself is hacked and record all the signals.
Unless they are doing proctoring as if it were a test, there will always be some way to circumvent it.
Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
I'm so used to the sponsorship thing that I just instinctively tap/click the right side of the screen a few times to skip it.
(As for why I don't use sponsorblock: I don't block them because I wanna take a few seconds to take a peak into the sponsor segment to make sure they don't have very evil sponsors like ahem "Betterhelp" (I don't trust someone that still have that as a sponsor in 2025)
Edit: Also, I'm pretry sure someone will build a locally run AI model that can detect the ads/buffering and cut it out. "AI" might not give you true information in terms of search results, but pattern recognition is like its main job, right?
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
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.
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.
I break HDCP right now. Those keys have been leaked for AGES. $10 amazon HDMI copy in between your videocard and the capture.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
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.
it's not hard to do it yourself either
How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I've never looked into this.
Open PassDCP software is one method, or you can obtain a splitter that strips hdcp
They aren't fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
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
theoretically anything is possible so what
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.