Table of Contents
How to fix Youtube playback errors on Chrome with adblocker installed
Problem Description
In March 2020, Youtube started displaying playback errors on monetized videos when using adblockers. You could either wait some 30 seconds until the video starts neitherless or refresh the page for the videos to play. This howto explains how to add a custom filter and rule to UBlock Origin to make life a little better.
Add custom filter and rule to UBlock Origin
Right-click the uBlock Origin icon, select “Options”, this will open the Dashboard. Click on “My Filters” and add a line:
@@||youtube.com/get_video*
From now on there will be occasional video advertisements that cannot be removed by reloading the Youtube video etc. But, they can almost instantly be skipped. For the skip button to appear, on the UBlock Origin Dashboard, go to My Filters and add a new rule for Youtube at the bottom of temp rules:
no-cosmetic-filtering: youtube.com true
Once done, click on Save, then “Save permanently” to move this rule to your permanent rules. Close the Ublock Origin page and reload youtube for these changes to go effective.
Why not just turn off UBlock Origin for youtube.com?
That would pollute every monetized video with overlay advertisements at the bottom of the video and they'd require you to click them away before they ever disappear. A positive side effect of just disabling UBlock Origin is that there will be less video advertisements that need to be skipped. So it is a matter of what you think is worse, the decision is yours. I personally don't want every video polluted so if you're like me who'd rather skip an occasional full screen ad then this howto is for you.
Are there any alternative solutions?
You can buy Youtube Premium and get rid of all ads for good and be able to play Youtube videos in the background on your phone. The Youtube Premium exclusive videos are rather irrelevant, but this also includes a Youtube Music Premium subscription. The interesting part however is the additionally included Google Play Music subscription which gives you access to stream the biggest archive of music (much larger than Spotify or Amazon and quite often as fresh as Beatport) on all your devices.