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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Oh no, the ads I block are getting even longer!?
I just purchased a new travel router that will have options for ad blocking built in. Would that block ads on any device sharing that connexion? TV, phone, PC, smart fridge,...?
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.
Honestly, it varies. Businesses are starting to get wise to DNS adblockers, and are serving more ads from their primary domain (this is part of why you can't block YouTube ads with a DNS blocker anymore - you can't block them at the DNS level without blocking all of YouTube).
You'll see a noticeable downtick in phone ads from web browsing and ad-sponsored games, but something like a TV or fridge will probably be unaffected because the ads will be served directly from the same host as the content. You'll see fewer ads but far from zero.
Also why are you connecting your smart fridge to a travel router? Do you travel with a smart fridge?
Fridges have ads...?
No XD i was just wondering what kind of ads it could block. It will be my dedicated VR router when not in my main setup and i'm wonder what else i could do with it.
Just FYI you don't need a special router to block ads on the DNS level, you just need to point the DNS settings in your current router to a server that does filtering. Theres a couple of public ones set up to do that for you but you can also point them to a LAN IP and roll your own DNS server (like Pi-Hole or AdGuard Home)
Depends on how they're served but mostly, yes
But, topically, will not block YouTube ads
Not youtube ads, sadly, if they are blocking based on domain names. For YouTube, you can use pipepipe, which do block ads as far as I have seen.
not unless you figured out how to adblock on youtube tv. this isn't for desktop clients.
and only a minor inconvience as youtube delays the video for adblockers, of course they will try to make that permanent somehow.
I'm just imagining how spammy it would be to see this reply on every comment that has more than 69 upvotes.
Yup. At one point that number was 69 in order to get to where it is now. Good job.
Thanks.