YouTube AdBlock - Does it exist on OpenWrt Platform

Suprise me by installing Kodi and getting developer ID for its YouTube addon. Do you see ads there too?

Fundamentally the purpose of https is to prevent anyone between the two sites from interfering with or seeing the transferred data. If it were possible to put yourself in the middle https would be broken and fraud would be rampant as criminals put themselves in the middle of your brokerage account and transferred your money and stocks to their own accounts.

It appears that viewtube is just a different website that you control which grabs the video from YouTube for you. So you're not breaking https you're just asking your own website to get and filter the data, this is the "special kind of proxy" but without a browser extension because You're surfing the viewtube site so there's no need to alter the site behavior.

Right yes - special kind of proxy in which we don't establish end-end encryption between YouTube and end device. Rather we have the special proxy obtain the YouTube data and recreate it without adverts in a way that is accessible to local hosts.

Another very crude idea was remote browser at the router in which that browser has 'ublock-origin' installed and x11 data is passed over html - or something along these lines. One could then access that remote browser from Safari on an iPad.

Do you suppose such solutions will always require powerful hardware? That there is no computationally light way to achieve the same net 'special proxy' effect thereby to render ad-free YouTube videos accessible in browsers on end devices without any (or very minimal) end device configuration?

Didn't go through all the posts in here but tried out privaxy since it looked cool, it did block some ads on some websites.. but youtube is a no-go due to the fact that they use HSTS

It is unfortunate that Apple makes us have to jump through all of these hoops in the first place. I wish they provided proper adblocking capability on iOS.

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Video lite on appstore - it does have it's own ads but way more acceptable than yt ones
And apple should let EU users to sideload apps by march 7 the latest (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/app-store-to-be-split-in-two-ahead-of-eu-iphone-sideloading-deadline.2416395/)

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Nice - yes the sideloading sounds promising, albeit I wonder how that will work on the edges of the EU and the UK including Northern Ireland. Will it work for visitors to the EU and then stop working once they return?

Also I did try the Orion browser suggestion above here:

on my iPhone 15 and that works - Orion allows you to install either Chrome or Firefox extensions including 'ublock-origin' - and it indeed blocks YouTube adverts, but being awkward I'd still like to keep using 'Safari' if possible.

And being able to strip out ads centrally at the router (like the way 'piped' or 'ViewTube' facilitates) still seems to me highly desirable, if indeed there is a way to do so in a computationally light way that would make it possible on a typical router.

Thanks to all that provided input, I am going to have a go at this.

Is it worth creating some sort of page with a summary of what to do?

Sure. It was a long thread! It would be nice to see whether it was helpful or not.

Hello - I can't read the whole thread while at work.. sadly.. but, is there a way to block out youtube ads? I believe adblock on openwrt used to do that, or maybe it was the adblock plugin on my laptop.
It's really becoming a pita to the point I'm wondering if I have to subscribe...

It was....

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Ads coming from the same YouTube domain, so the DNS blocking NEVER WORKED on YouTube platform, so what you believe was not true, the adblock on OpenWrt can never block ads in YouTube, only browser plugin one might be able to (but heard that it's more difficult to do now).

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Hi, if it is not too much trouble, could you answer these questions:

  1. Can I install privAxy on a router with an ARM processor like the BPI-R4?

  2. Is there a guide or can you make a guide on how to install privAxy, configure privAxy and make it work together with OpenWrt?

  3. Is privAxy complicated to use and configure and only recommended for super-advanced users or can it be easily configured via SSH with commands?

everything's possible, if you have enought time and/or money.

installation isn't the issue, it's a single binary.
cross compiling might be.

if you check the github page, you'll notice it got a webUI.

YT's new ad strategy will probably break most adblockers, at least until they catch up.

https://9to5google.com/2024/06/12/youtube-ad-injection/

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I wouldn't rely on it even if it was supported on OpenWrt (which it doesn't). It is more like a proof of concept which actually work pretty well.

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hi... i feel everybory are losing the focus, and elaborating complicated, heavy and non specific solutions

why not to implement some package compatible with SPONSORBLOCK api?

im not an expert, but it seems sponsorblock runs on any network connected device and scans to find youtube/chromecast compatible devices (with mdns/bonjour/avahi?) , and then send packets to disable/mute/kills ads, sponsors, suggestions, etc etc

API = https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/API_Docs

source:

ports:

(here ^, would be fantastic to have an "openwrt port")

an api implementing program i am trying:

this is what i am trying now in my home server (raspberrypi), is a python app.. i intended to left running in my home server with screen and cron... there are many other third party apps written in many languages, i tried one written in go that installs as a systemd service but i removed because uses another chromecast go cli interface that forces discovery in ipv6 and fails (i dont use ipv6 on my openwrt lan)

i landed to it from pure casuality, reading codecguide mpc-hc features (i.e play direct youtube streams) ... i heard about sponsorblock some time ago (inside youtube revanced) but never understood what is about