Make YouTube less annoying
Block annoying adverts
Adverts are undoubtedly the biggest annoyance on YouTube and one that’s got considerably worse in the last year. They have become more frequent in videos on the YouTube website and mobile apps, and are now longer and often impossible to skip on smart TVs.
Previously, you could avoid adverts in your browser by installing an ad blocker, but YouTube now detects and blocks such tools, because they “violate our Terms of Service”. Its clampdown means that if you want to continue watching videos, you need to either disable your ad blocker, add YouTube to its whitelist of allowed sites or stump up $16.99 a month for ad-free YouTube Premium. Whichever option you choose, Google rakes in revenue, while its users – who supply most of YouTube’s content for free – suffer increasingly irritating ads or pay over $200 a year to avoid them.
Thankfully, there are still several free ways to block adverts on YouTube – or at least bypass them. The brilliant content-blocking extension uBlock Origin (https://ublockorigin.com/) regularly updates its filters to circumvent YouTube’s ever-tightening restrictions and continue blocking ads in videos.
To refresh these filters, right-click the uBlock Origin toolbar button and select Options then Filters. Click the ‘Purge all caches’ button ( 1 in our screenshot below) and choose ‘Update now’ 2 .
New extensions have also sprung up, which either fast-forward adverts or skip them as soon as the option is available. This not only helps them evade YouTube’s ad-blocker ban, but also means that content creators still get paid. Examples include Ad Accelerator (www.snipca. com/48757), which silently speeds through ads up to 10 times faster, and Skip Ad (www.snipca.com/48758),
which skips them automatically. Both can be installed in any Chromium browser – for Firefox, try Automatic AdSkipper (www.snipca.com/48759).
Another option is to use an alternative interface for YouTube, which doesn’t connect to Google’s advertising servers. The most popular option is Piped (https://piped.video/trending), a free website that lets you search YouTube and play videos in your browser, without seeing any ads or other annoyances. You can create playlists (see screenshot above) and subscribe to channels without registering for an account; view videos in picture-in-picture mode; share clips with other people; and read the original user comments from YouTube.
FreeTube (https://freetubeapp.io/) is another fantastic front end for ad-free viewing, though it’s a desktop program rather than a website.
To avoid adverts in YouTube videos on your Android phone or tablet, install the free app NewPipe (https://newpipe. net/), which uses the same technology as Piped. It’s not available from the Google Play Store, so you first need to download the alternative app store F-Droid (www. snipca.com/48761). If that sounds too fiddly – or too risky because you need to allow the installation of ‘unknown apps’ – visit Piped in your mobile browser, a trick that will also work on iPhones and iPads.
You can enjoy YouTube without ads on your TV by installing the free app SmartTube (https://smarttubeapp. github.io/), which works on Google/ Android TV and Fire TV devices. Again, this isn’t available from official app stores, but full instructions are provided
on its GitHub page at https://github. com/yuliskov/SmartTube.
2 Skip sponsored messages
An increasing number of YouTube videos now feature lengthy sponsored messages from the creators, which promote and endorse the products and services of third-party companies. These sponsorships appear at the beginning or end of videos, and because they’re integrated with the main content, they’re able to bypass ad blockers.
You can avoid many of these sponsored messages by installing the extension SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay. app/), which is available for all the main browsers, and for Firefox and Safari on Android and iOS devices. This add-on skips sponsored intros and outros that it identifies from its database of more than 15 million ‘skip segments’ reported by users. Just make sure ‘Skipping is enabled’ is switched on (see screenshot below).
SponsorBlock’s developer claims it now has more than 13 million users who have saved nearly 2,363 years between them by
skipping sponsored messages.
The extension can also block reminders to subscribe to creators’ channels, the non-music sections of music videos and “other annoying parts of YouTube videos”. It lets you whitelist YouTube channels you want to support through their paid-for promotions, or disable sponsorship-skipping temporarily. SponsorBlock is built into some alternative YouTube front-ends, including Piped, SmartTube and FreeTube.
You can block subscription reminders without needing to install an add-on. Click your profile picture in the top-right corner of the YouTube site and choose Settings, then ‘Playback & performance’ and untick the ‘Info cards’ option.
3 Stop videos auto-playing
Some people like the fact that YouTube automatically plays a related video when the current one finishes, because it saves you having to search for something else to watch. But, for many others, autoplaying videos are more of an annoyance than a convenience, because they drag you down a YouTube ‘rabbit hole’ and divert your attention from more important tasks.
Autoplay is enabled by default for all YouTube users aged 18 and over, and will continue indefinitely on your PC or for four hours on a mobile device connected to Wi-Fi (half an hour on 4G/5G).
Thankfully, you can switch it off by clicking the Auto-play switch in the controls along the bottom of the video player – the icon will change from a ‘play’ symbol to a ‘pause’ one. The same switch is available in the YouTube app for Android and iOS, but appears at the top of the video player.
Another way to disable Autoplay on mobile devices is to tap the You tab in the bottom-right corner of the app’s home screen and select the Settings cog, then Auto-play. Switch off the ‘Mobile phone/tablet’ option under ‘Auto-play next video’ (see screenshot above right). You can also disable the setting in the YouTube app for smart TVs, to stop videos auto-playing on your telly.
To prevent previews of videos from playing automatically when you hover your cursor over them, open the ‘Playback & performance’ settings on the YouTube website and switch off ‘Video previews’. In the mobile app, disable ‘Playback in feeds’ in the General settings, and on your smart TV change the Previews setting to Off.
4 Turn off recommendations Another way YouTube tries to keep you watching longer than you should is to recommend further videos to play as soon as you finish the current one. These suggestions are based on your viewing history, but don’t always reflect your tastes – and may compromise your privacy if you share your computer.
To stop YouTube recommending videos, you need to turn off your watch history. Either click your profile picture on the YouTube website and choose ‘Your data in YouTube’ or open the Settings screen in the mobile app and select the option there. Click the arrow next to ‘On’ under YouTube Watch History, ensure the options ‘Include the YouTube videos that you watch’ and ‘Include your searches on YouTube’ are ticked, then click or tap ‘Turn off’ ( 1 in our screenshot above right), and select Pause.
Next, choose ‘Manage history’ 2 and select ‘Delete all time’ in the Delete dropdown menu. This will wipe your watch history so YouTube can no longer use it to recommend videos. Last year, YouTube started showing a blank homepage when Watch History was disabled, but this has now been fixed.
If YouTube still shows recommendations of ‘trending’ or random videos, install the extension Unhook in your Chromium browser (www.snipca. com/48769) or Firefox (www.snipca. com/48770). This hides all manner of distractions on the site, including recommendations in its sidebar and at the end of videos. Unhook is also available on Android devices as an add-on for the Firefox app.
5 Hide YouTube Shorts videos When YouTube started losing viewers to TikTok, it decided to copy the rival service’s short-video format by introducing Shorts. These clips now appear on its homepage and in your search results whether you want to watch them or not.
Because Shorts only last up to 60
seconds and are in vertical ‘portrait’ format, they’re aimed more at younger viewers (and people with short attention spans) on phones than the typical PC user, which can make them more irritating than interesting. YouTube doesn’t give you the option to hide these videos, but there are some workarounds.
Install the extension ‘YouTube-shorts block’ in your Chromium browser (www.snipca.com/48771) or Firefox (www.snipca.com/48772) and it will force Shorts videos to play in the standard YouTube player rather than portrait mode. Click the add-on’s toolbar button and switch on the option ‘Play the YouTube shorts video as if it were a normal video’, then either reload the page or click the Short to change its format.
Alternatively, click the three-dot icon and choose ‘hide “shorts” tab’ and ‘hide shorts video’ (see screenshot below) to avoid seeing Shorts altogether – again you’ll need to refresh the tab. Note that the ‘hide shorts video’ option is still being tested, so may not always work.
NewPipe was recently updated to include Shorts videos, but you can disable them by going to Settings then Content, tapping ‘Channel tabs’ and deselecting Shorts.
6 Play only the audio from videos
Although Google would prefer us to stream music on its YouTube Music service (https://music.youtube.com),
most of us still use the main YouTube website to find and play old and new songs. But when you want to listen to music in the background, the accompanying videos can prove a distraction and resource hog.
You can hide the visuals by installing Music Mode (www.snipca.com/48777)
in your Chromium browser or Firefox (www.snipca.com/48778). This extension blocks all videos so that only the audio content is played. It can also hide thumbnail images and skip ads.
To activate the add-on and switch YouTube to jukebox mode, either click its toolbar button and switch it on for the current tab, press Ctrl+M or click ‘Hide the video’ on the YouTube player’s controls (see screenshot below). Music Mode also works on YouTube Music and YouTube videos embedded on other sites.
The YouTube interface Piped has this feature built in. Simply click the headphones icon on a video to listen without watching – though you’ll still see the video’s preview image.
7 Bookmark specific moments in videos
YouTube lets you save a particular moment in a video by right-clicking it and choosing ‘Copy video URL at current time’. However, this relies on you remembering to paste the URL elsewhere, and can prove tiresome if you want to bookmark several moments.
A much better idea is to install Bookmark It in your Chromium browser
(www.snipca.com/48782) or Firefox
(www.snipca.com/48783). This lets you save multiple moments in YouTube videos, and add notes to them to remind you why they’re interesting or important.
To use Bookmark It, click its toolbar button and choose Log In/Register to sign up for a free account – you can use your Google account to save time. Start playing a YouTube video and, when you get to a good bit, press the ‘b’ key on your keyboard to create a bookmark and add a comment. Press ‘Enter’ to save or Esc to cancel. You can access your bookmark collection by clicking Bookmark It’s toolbar button and click its timestamps to revisit your saved moments in the relevant videos. Click ‘Delete’ to remove the bookmarks once you’re finished with them.
8 Download YouTube videos for free
Apart from ad-free viewing, the main incentive to pay for YouTube Premium is the ability to download videos. This means you can save them to watch offline on your PC or mobile device, though – for copyright reasons – you can only play them through the YouTube website or app. YouTube now provides a Download button below every video, but clicking this just prompts you to subscribe to Premium – or try it for free for 30 days.
Although YouTube has clamped down on third-party downloaders, and bans them from the Chrome Web Store and Google Play Store, there are still several ways to download videos for free. The usual caveats apply about downloading copyrighted material, get it from www. snipca.com/48773, but here are the main free options.
First, you could use an online tool such as Yt1s (www.snipca.com/48774), which lets you simply copy and paste the URL of a YouTube video, then click Convert to download it in MP4 format (see screenshot top right). It’s basic but works well – for the moment, at least.
Then there are desktop downloaders like 4K Video Downloader+ (www. snipca.com/48775), which have more features, formats and resolutions, though some options – such as downloading more than one video at a time – are usually limited to a paid-for version.
ClipGrab is completely free, with no restrictions, but make sure you click the ‘Show all download options’ link, then the tiny ‘Download version without thirdparty offers’ link on its download page (www.snipca.com/48776) or it will be flagged as risky by your antivirus.
When you first run the program, click
Continue to install ‘youtube-dlp’, which enables ClipGrab to download YouTube videos. You can then search for content, or copy a YouTube URL, and click ‘Grab this clip’ (see screenshot below) to save it to your hard drive.
Additionally, some alternative YouTube front-ends let you download videos to watch offline, including FreeTube on your PC and NewPipe on your Android phone or tablet. Just click the Download button below the video player and choose your preferred format and resolution – unlike on YouTube, you won’t be asked to pay.
9 Capture screenshots of videos
Last year, Chrome and Edge introduced a rudimentary way to take screenshots of YouTube videos: right-click the video twice, select ‘Copy video frame’ and paste the result into an image editor. As this indicates that Google isn’t averse to allowing screen grabs of YouTube videos, we can only wonder why the option hasn’t been added to the website – presumably for the standard ‘copyright reasons’.
The YouTube front-end Piped confirms that this would be easy to implement: it has a ‘Download frame’ button below each button, which you can click to save the currently displayed picture as a PNG file. But to get the feature on the official
YouTube website, you need to install a browser extension.
The simplest is Screenshot YouTube Video for Chromium browsers (www. snipca.com/48785), which adds a ‘Take screenshot’ camera button to the YouTube video player’s controls (see screenshot right). Click this to capture and download a screenshot in JPEG format, which is handily labelled with the title of the video. For Firefox, try the similar YouTube Screenshot Button (www.snipca. com/48786), which lets you save screenshots as PNG or JPEG files.
On your phone or tablet, you can take screengrabs of videos by playing them full-screen and using your device’s screenshot function – on most Android devices, press the Power and Volume Down buttons simultaneously; on an iPhone or iPad, press either Power and Volume Up, or Power and Home.
10 Summarise videos using AI
When you’re seeking information from a YouTube video, but don’t have time to watch the whole thing, the simplest solution is to click the ‘Show transcript’ button in the description and peruse the text version. However, because these transcripts are merely time-stamped lists of the video’s closed captions, they can seem disjointed and difficult to read.
To save time, you can use an AI tool to summarise the content of the video for you. Edge has just added this option to its Copilot assistant, Brave’s new Leo chatbot offers the feature and Google’s Bard tool is now able to “understand YouTube videos” (www.snipca.com/48788). All three base their summaries on a video’s closed-captions file, so don’t work if one isn’t available, and also let you ask follow-up questions about the content.
Copilot and Leo are built into their browsers, while Bard requires you to enable its YouTube extension and paste the video URL into the chat box on its website (https://bard.google.com), with a ‘Summarise this video’ instruction. Until it’s properly integrated with Chrome, you can get a video-summary feature in the browser by installing a third-party extension such as ‘Unlimited Summary Generator for YouTube’ (www. snipca.com/48793).
This provides both a transcript (that’s more coherent than YouTube’s own one) and an AI-generated summary (see screenshot below), which you can copy and paste into a document or email. You’ll need to sign up for a free ChatGPT account (www.snipca.com/48796) to use the tool.
“On your phone or tablet, you can take screengrabs of videos by playing them full-screen and using your device’s screenshot function”
11 Adjust the playback speed When YouTube introduced a host of new features and improvements last October, it included a way to fastforward videos by long-clicking or long-pressing the player. This plays content at twice the normal speed, until you release your mouse button or finger, and complements the basic ‘Playback speed’ options in the Settings menu.
To get more precise control over the speed of YouTube videos, install the Chromium extension YouTube Playback Speed Control (www.snipca. com/48801) – the Firefox version is called YouTube Speed Control (www. snipca.com/48802). This lets you increase and decrease the playback speed by either pressing the ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons on your keyboard, or by holding down Shift and scrolling your mouse wheel up and down.
The speed adjustment is shown in a tiny box in the top-right corner of the video, which also has clickable speed controls, and – whereas YouTube limits you to 2x speed – you can play videos up to 16x faster (see screenshot above). To change the extension’s keyboard shortcuts or set a default playback speed for all videos, right-click its toolbar button and select Options.
The NewPipe app for Android lets you increase a video’s ‘tempo’ by up to 3x, but otherwise you’re restricted to YouTube’s default speed settings.
12 Improve the picture quality YouTube automatically adjusts the streaming quality of videos, based on the current speed of your internet connection. Provided it’s at least 2.5Mbps, the resolution should be 720p high definition, which you can try to increase by clicking the Settings cog, then Quality and choosing a higher setting.
To set videos to always stream at the best available quality, not what YouTube decides, install the Chromium extension Auto HD/Automatic HD (www.snipca. com/48804). Click its toolbar button to set your preferred quality for YouTube videos. The options go up to 2160p (4K) and 4320p (8K), but note the quality will default to 1080p (HD) on videos when 4K or 8K aren’t available. Conversely, you can also reduce the resolution if you want to conserve bandwidth.
Click ‘Best available quality’ (see screenshot above) to automatically choose the highest resolution for the current video, or ‘Auto mode’ to return to YouTube’s default setting. For Firefox, install the similar add-on ‘Video Quality Settings for YouTube’ (www.snipca. com/48805).
In the YouTube mobile app, you can increase the video quality by tapping the You tab and choosing Settings, then ‘Video quality preferences’. Select ‘Higher picture quality’ for mobile networks – though bear in mind that this will use more data – and Wi-Fi. To set a specific resolution, tap the Settings cog in the top-right corner of a video and choose Quality, then Advanced.
13 Enhance the audio quality
The volume control on YouTube is limited to louder, quieter or mute, which is hardly a sophisticated means of adjusting the audio levels of different videos. If you want to improve the sound quality on YouTube, install the excellent Chromium extension YouGears (www.snipca.com/48806).
This adds several useful options to the YouTube player’s controls, including an Audio button. Click this to open an equaliser panel, which lets you move frequency sliders up and down to get the best sound possible for the current video.
If you’re unsure what the different sliders do, click the dropdown Preset menu to select a suitable setting for the type of content you’re watching, or the way you’re listening. The presets include Movie, Voice, Rock, Classic and Headphone, and there’s also an option to switch on Dolby Surround 5.1/7.1.
YouGears also inserts its own volume control next to the existing one, which lets you boost the sound level above YouTube’s maximum. For similar options in Firefox, try ‘YouTube Audio Equaliser and Amplifier’ (www.snipca. com/48807).
The YouTube mobile app now includes a handy feature called ‘Stable volume’, which balances the audio level
when you’re watching and listening to videos. This means you’re less likely to be startled by abrupt transitions from quiet dialogue to loud music and sound effects. Tap the Settings cog in the top-right corner of the video player, choose ‘Additional settings’ and ensure ‘Stable volume’ is switched on.
14 Prevent videos from buffering
If the videos you watch on YouTube sometimes ‘buffer’ – which means they hang while loading or freeze during playback – the problem may be caused by a slow internet connection or a lack of available memory or processing power on your computer. Reducing the video quality can help prevent buffering but, if not, try installing the extension FastStream Video Player.
Available for Chromium browsers (www.snipca.com/48810) and Firefox
(www.snipca.com/48811), this tool replaces the video player on YouTube and on other sites with its own player. By using up to six concurrent connections to download and stream the current video, it significantly reduces the risk of buffering to provide smoother playback.
Activate the extension by clicking its toolbar button and, after a short pause while FastStream starts loading the current video in its player, you’ll be able to enjoy uninterrupted viewing. You can set it to turn on automatically every time you visit YouTube, and turn off when you leave the site, by clicking the Settings cog and entering https:// www.youtube.com in the ‘Autoenable URLs’ box ( 1 in our screenshot above).
FastStream Video Player also includes options for improving audio and picture quality 2 , adjusting playback speed and taking screenshots, while the Firefox version lets you download videos.
You can check if a YouTube video is likely to buffer by right-clicking it and choosing ‘Stats for nerds’. A panel will open revealing your current connection speed and your ‘Buffer Health’, which shows you how much data YouTube is preloading to prevent playback problems.
If videos keep buffering on your phone or tablet, try switching to ‘Data saver’ mode in the YouTube app’s ‘Video quality preferences’, either for your mobile or Wi-Fi network or both (see screenshot left). This will reduce the picture quality but make streaming smoother.