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Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
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...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