this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Those will not block YT ads.
They'll block ads at a DNS level, but YouTube ads are delivered directly into the video stream.
This is correct
This is false
So far
Sure, but that can be said about almost anything.
Still, I'd be surprised if they went the route of embedding ads into the stream, in part because of measurability/skipability/etc. It's definitely not out of the question, but I think we're still ways to go before we get there.
And even then, tools like yt-dlp would probably be able to apply some heuristics to figure out which segments are foreign to the stream and slice them out that way. Blocking yt-dlp would require DRM, which in turn requires changing the transcoding pipeline in a pretty non-trivial way. I also doubt they would willingly go this route.
And the reason is that those ad-blockers are based on DNS block lists, and YouTube ads are served by the same servers that also serve videos.
This is my understanding as well, yeah.
Youtubes ads are not delivered into the videostream. That would mean reencodingevery video for every user and would need an insane amount of computing power.
Why would you need to re encode when you can literally pause one stream swap in the ad and then swap back in the paused one in the same response
Exactly. Instead of editing within the video stream you just switch to a second stream.
However from youtubes perspective that has the downside that the switching logic is where adblockers can hook in to block the ads.
You actually don't have to, on account of how adaptive video streaming works. It's fully possible to serve a few segments of ad content mid-stream.