You might have noticed that even on Firefox (depending on your lists) YouTube may detect uBlock Origin on Firefox now

There’s already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.

They’re both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).

Both don’t load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.

Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here

  • @GenderNeutralBroEnglish
    23•9 months ago

    I’d also like to point out that mpv has youtube-dl built-in (and can also use the cooler fork, yt-dlp). You can open YouTube links directly in mpv and they will play with no bullshit. It can even pull 4K streams.

    There are browser plugins that let you open links directly in external programs like mpv, although they are a bit of a hassle to set up (especially if you are on Ubuntu with their godforsaken Snaps).

    • FrellwitEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      Also for anyone wondering how to set the default quality for videos.

      Edit your mpv.confand add ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=720]+bestaudio/best[height<=720] to play all videos in 720p for example.

      Lemmy can’t display some characters correctly. replace &lt; with a left pointing arrow <

      • @GenderNeutralBroEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        Ooh, never heard of this before and it looks super cool. Thanks for the tip!