YouTube won’t let me watch this video with my VPN on. Is this a new thing?
Proton + Ghostery wombo combo should still work for now for ad blocking and VPN.
Only criminals use VPNs. Well known fact.
Likely depends on your VPN. I use Proton and it’s fine.
Fuck YouTube. I deleted it. I can search for videos individually if I want to.
FreeTube running over Tor is working for me.
can you actually load hd videos through tor these days?
Yes. Ive managed to watch 4K 60fps HDR content from YouTube over Tor without hiccups.
FreeTube my beloved!!
Does freetube work on Android TVs?
Probably not, but I’d try LibreTube
Just use one of the FOSS front-ends: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube
I find if I use my VPN and I’m not logged in, it says I can’t watch unless I log in. If I turn it off, it works. I think if you’re logged in, they can track you and monetize you. If you’re behind a VPN and they also don’t know who you are, they want to push you into telling them who you are.
What I’ve found as a workaround is to search videos using Duck Duck Go. It has a way you can watch YouTube stuff through DDG without being logged in. I imagine they’ll eventually figure out a way to patch that.
It’s ok, YouTube, I don’t need the best content, just give me the okay content, it’s fine.
Just an obligatory Grayjay plug.
Grayjay is great but I wish it was fully open source
I think its better to leave it Closed Source, otherwise, YouTube team will be able to see how it works and how they circumvent their efforts on blocking 3rd party clients.
Alternatively they could decompile it
They’re killing third-party client access, limiting adblockers, blocking VPNs, and forcing sign in more and more. I sincerely hate it but this was inevitable. They have their monopoly, this is just the “abuse that position and enshittify for more data and money” stage. I hope an alternative takes off because I refuse to play by their rules.
The day the finally kill adblockers and third party clients I’ll stop watching and I started to think I won’t miss it at all after barely open it in a week.
Try a less popular VPN server by your provider. Sometimes I have to use Uzbekistan to get Reddit and other sites to allow me on
Wow, this is sad!
I use MullvadVPN and i have never encountered this issue before. Hopefully won’t need to either.
I’ll tell you another weird detail I found out today… A lot if my coworkers had their uBlock terminated by the chrome browser. I use Ubuntu with chromium because reasons and somehow, my uBlock is still active and working o.o it has not been terminated and I still get rid of those nasty YouTube ads.
I use Mullvad but get a “confirm you’re not a bot by signing in” message occasionally. All I do is switch servers and clear all history/cookies/etc. It works 95% of the time.
I use MullvadVPN and I almost always encounter this issue.
It probably depends on which server(s) you’re using.
It does, I’ve found Albania, Estonia and Nigeria skip the issue at least. If anyone else got server recommendations that work feel free to drop! I should probably clarify that my Mullvad connection is a barebones Wireguard one running on top of Tailscale
Sometimes the more commonly used servers like UK start working for a few hours/days but that never lasts. The 3 listed are basically bulletproof in my experience though
And yea, using a frontend will not bypass this. Unless that frontend is an online downloader like Cobalt.tools or amp4.cc. Or Invidious I guess but that… Has its own issues
This maybe affects Mullvad so strongly cause they never bother hididng/swapping their server IPs and don’t have a particularly large plethora of them unlike competitors?
Yes, definitely a new thing. I see a different message but it is along the lines of I have to sign in so that they know that I am not a bot. A bunch of other websites were already doing this where they work without signing in if you are not on VPN but want you to sign in if you are on VPN.
