Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.

Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that’s certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin’s filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension’s dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google’s efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      Thanks for sharing, provided some insight into how YT is doing this.

      Seems very easy to bypass if they’re just swapping in new TS HLS/DASH segments, the harder part will be identifying what segments are part of the video and what segments are ads sliced in