Pi-Hole or something else for network ad blocking?

plenipotentprotogod@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 165 points –

I've been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I'm looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.

I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I'd like something that'll run as an LXC container or a VM. I'm also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?

109

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Pi-hole is great, but unfortunately ads in YouTube or other streaming services is not one of the things it blocks.

Glad I read this - all my other devices block ads perfectly well already, but was wondering if I could block YouTube ads on my Apple TV... I guess not!

Your best bet is getting a platform your can sideload apps onto and running SmartTube

Not sure of any downside yet but setting your country to Albania via vpn removes all YouTube ads on Apple TV. Was just informed of this yesterday and as mentioned there may be reasons to not do this.

PiHole and similar services just use DNS blocking, which only works if the ads are served via a third-party ad server. Sites with their own ad inventory (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) can't be blocked this way since they can just serve the ads from the same domain as their regular content.

I wonder why we don't have AI browser extensions that can recognise and obscure possible ads / unwanted content yet

Because the AI isn't needed, and would be computationally expensive.

Extensions like ublock origin and sponsorblock work just fine.