lizardkink

Gents, After about 3 or even 4 months of experimenting with different solutions and workarounds, digging deep into countless forums, i must say that there's no ideal solution to the above. The specific problem of filtering Youtube ads on devices that won't support browser based ad-blockers (e.g. smart TVs) can't be solved on the network/ router level. Since Google is serving their content and the ads from the same host, DNS filtering won't cut it. You can resolve IPs, reverse lookup DNSes and automate/ recursively add them to filter tables, and in the end you'll block the whole CDN including the content. No matter how intelligent your regex rule is, it will face the same problem. I have tried to triage packets with DPI. Fired up virtual machines running Sophos, PRTG and ntop/nDPI just to catch the streams and analyse them. Wiresharked into the soul of my TV. Hell, i even MITM attacked myself just for fun! I have followed the same logic as @nuhll You know what worked? Streaming to the TV from mobile with Youtube Vanced. Probably there's a thingy around the headers used by Vanced to forward the request. I really did not investigate much. I still see the "starting" ad, from time to time, but that's it. Have not tried VPNs, proxies or even upstream DNS providers, for the reasons mentioned above.