Other What currently makes your life awesome?

First test of moving to full wired connections for our PC's and consoles after full fibre install (was going to wait until we remodel the entire house next year (Ethernet in the walls) but thought for around £100 why wait.

From ~230Mbps down / 200 Up on homeplugs to ~914Mbps down / 947Mbps(!) up on both machines.

Concurrent using Speedtest as a metric both machines can hit ~475 down and 480 Up at the same time.

Quite happy with that.

Now just have to do all of the fun of actually installing it all neatly and doing the same on the consoles

 

Smart tube next.

I've never minded watching a couple of ads and a sponsor on YouTube. However, about two weeks ago it seemed to become far more aggressive. Like, 8 ads on a 20 minute video as well as more than one sponsor. Couple that with 90% of them being unskippable and going on for nearly a minute (double unskippable) and it was making me miserable. It's even worse now too because if you pause it for a wee then come back you're treated to another 50 seconds of adverts. It even shows another advert when the video ends and so on.

Like I said, far too aggressive and imo greedy. You see Linus calling people pirates but I'm not being funny he doesn't seem to have any problems making ends meet. Especially when he shows his new mansion. The ends are meeting like a mofo.

So I don't feel bad. I would if YT keep continually trying to get me to pay £13 a month to remove the ads. It's just beyond bloody greedy. That's £2 more than Netflix ffs.

 

Couple job interviews and two dates coming up next week

 

I agree the amount of ads and their sheer irrelevance are urine boiling, me I went with Enhancer for Youtube, working like a charm

 

That's decent on homeplugs.

 

Very much the same here. There are a few channels that I routinely watch and really enjoy and I would not mind helping to support them with watching some ads now and again. However, that is the issue, "now and again". But when you start to end up with double ads at the start and end that you can't skip and other dotted all through the video then that's a nope, too much. Now I run a Chrome extension simply called Adblock for YouTube. Just another case of too much ruining it for everyone again.

 

Indeed the overall speed is fine (as was reasonable prior to fibre). Unfortunately the stability was a little iffy at times (my PC would just drop the connection at times). I think its down to the connection "jumping" from the ring downstairs to upstairs.

That said they are rated at 1300Mbps (technically 650 as like Wifi they tend to combine transmit and receive together for marketing one ups) so a little less impressive in isolation.

TBH I am not sure why I didn't really think about running full Ethernet before now. Probably just been thinking that we will leave it until the remodel but that got moved out a bit thanks to the Pandemic and now the whole price uncertainty on everything - we want more in the rainy day kitty than previously planned.

 

Honestly I was fine with it for over two years but recently it just seems they're doubling down to the point it was beyond a joke.

I know TV in the USA is literally a spam fest. Like South park. They show the intro song and title then it's ads. Then half way through there's more ads and toward the end there's even more. So much so that a 22 odd minute episode takes 40+ minutes to view.

I was fine with watching a few but yeah, it's beyond a joke now. Even videos with less than a thousand views from streamers are now absolutely stuffed with ads. Like before? On something like Hoovies I expected it. But on low rent videos with hardly even any editing?

Talking of Hoovies. He seems to be going insane with his ad placement. It even saves the double long ones for when it would be more stressful to reload the video and then start playing from where the ad was. All the while the app itself is also full of ad aids as well as them popping up their £13 player and making you refuse it.

At least Clint (LGR) doesn't stuff his vids with ads. Nor does Techmoan, so it seems they have a choice and some of them are just being stupidly greedy.

 

If you enable monetisation, you don't always get a choice of where, when, or how frequently YouTube stuffs adverts into your videos. Sometimes you can clearly see where a channel has carefully timed their ads so it doesn't disrupt the content, but more often than not the ads are either: pre- or post-roll, or just splattered throughout the video so that they literally cut people off mid-sentence.

I can't even consistently block it on Apple TV or Android TV, not even with DNS-based blocking (pfBlockerNG, PiHole, etc).

 

I stopped watching Linus a few years ago for a huge list of reasons. He started catering to children way more. I was fine with the big-eyes thumbnail thing, but I'll add it because it still signals how much he's chasing views from low-hanging metric increasing things and not better content. They spend so much money on modding tools, but don't hire an expert or invest the time into making anyone an expert in using them. Watching them use the CNC or really any power tools is makes me feel horrible for the abuse the tool is receiving and horrified at the dangerous ways they often use the tools. A few years of hardware scarcity also makes it less interesting to watch when everything is crazy expensive and impossible to buy. Finally, and most importantly, his merch plugs are the most ham-fisted, detracting nonsense I've ever seen. I hate them so much. Every now and then I'll watch a video and in the most inconvenient moment he'll jump in, "just like this [insert product] I'm [appropriate verb]ing!" I wouldn't care if he plugged his stuff at the beginning or end of the video, but inserting it at stupid moments makes the quality of the actual content 1000x worse. And since that's the reason anyone comes to watch, having content that is now unwatchably bad means I just don't watch it anymore.

 

LTT doesn't help himself by using the word segway to clumsily squeeze ads in literally 2-4 times per video.

 

You can't block it through the app, no. I tried that with Blok something. It works for about 10 mins then the app takes over again.

Smart YT next is its own app. Not only does it block the ads it also removes all sponsored content too. Which I was really surprised about. I guess the way it works is the person who uploaded the video has to tag where their sponsorship is so the ads don't play over it.

I had to use downloader on Amazon fire in order to get the APK.

It also remembers where you were, something else they want £13 a month for.

Do note that some ads are placed by YT but most if not all are placed by the uploader. Techmoan will do a video and literally place one ad in it and warn you it's coming and why. Usually because it was an expensive video to make.

Shiey (train surfing urbex) has no ads at all and relies on his patreons.

 

Purple are the ads, yellow the sponsors. You can see Steve isn't quite as greedy as others. That said there are two sneaky sponsors sneaked in there also. It skips all of it. It even comes up and says "Skipped sponsored content" and tells you who it was from lmao.

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

 

I like his server stuff. I do, I won't lie. I've always had a hard on for server gear as I used to maintain ours at work in the 90s. And what he gets? is dream material. I don't watch anything else of his.

I did watch a couple of vids about his new house. It's literally a mansion. And he's decking it out with hundreds of thousands worth of gear. Couple that to the stuff he has (that you have mentioned) that he barely even touches and god knows what else and IMO? his rant about people watching the videos with an ad blocker are pirates? was what wound me up enough to get mad. Like I said, before that I would grumble as the ads played but they were getting more persistent and aggressive. And feckin LOUD too. Like Apple's green Iphone ad. It blasts out this really awful song IN THE JUNGLE O O O WHERE ONLY FEW WILL GO. When you have a system like mine and it's 2am? yeah, it's urine boiling. Especially as it is totally unskippable.

Couple that with Hoovie continually bragging about how much money he has wasted on a Ferrari and then saying it's down to people who watch his videos? yeah, enough was enough. It's not a nice sight watching people disappear up their own asses. I wouldn't mind but people are starving. His own people. I thought the UK was bad but it never ceased to amaze me how easily someone with tons of cash in the USA could walk past someone who had absolutely nothing whilst sticking their nose high in the air.

I'm not having a dig at all you yanks dude Especially ones from Phila best place I've ever been that.

 

I don't trust third-party replacements for services like YouTube, I never will. I can't install them on Apple TV anyway... because Apple... and I already use ad-blocking plugins in the browser. I do need to get DNS-based blocking set back up, but I was having loads of problems with pfBlockerNG breaking websites and I don't have the spare compute for a PiHole right now...

 

That's great, but it won't work on my Apple TV

 

Yeesh, no thanks. I tried HTPC-type solutions way back in the day; had all sorts of Kodi plugins, sofa-friendly keyboard & mouse, etc... Outside of maybe home cinema use, modern streaming boxes have absolutely killed HTPCs stone dead for me.