You can stop certain js files from running, but it's way more fine grained than that. Blocking external scripts would lead to massive breakage. If you wanna kno

You can stop certain js files from running, but it's way more fine grained than that. Blocking external scripts would lead to massive breakage. If you wanna know how ad filters work, look at a filter list: https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt > I can prove there are other ways to retrieve videos without retrieving ads. Go ahead? There is no technical reason why Google can't serve you ads. You are not using DOM filters and we've already established that your DNS filter has no effect on YouTube. Google is choosing not to show you ads > I use the commandline (netcat + TLS proxy + ftp) to download video > URL decoding and a little grep Eww, that'll break every time YouTube changes their ui. None of that is necessary. youtube-dl works with pretty much every video site, does not require a wacky setup, and it tracks YouTube changes pretty much instantly. It also works with playlists, entire channels, etc. You'll spend years replicating all the little features like quality selection, subtitles, etc if you use shell scripting for that.