Everyone is familiar with the ad clips that are a mainstay of video/news services such as Hulu or NBC, that are shown before the actual programming. Typically 20 or 30 seconds in duration, these are no major nuisance in small doses; except with more and more people increasingly consuming TV programming, news and video on the internet, these 20 or 30 seconds can add up into a large chunk of time (and bandwidth). Wouldn’t it be great if there were a browser plugin that removed introductory ads from videos?
AdBlock Video is precisely such an extension. Available for Firefox (alas no Chrome version as of this writing), this free plugin will typically allow the first ad that the video service will display, but manage to circumvent every ad thereafter within the same browsing session.
How it works: install the Firefox plugin, then browser video services as normal. The first introductory ad on the first video that you play will be displayed, however, ads will likely be skipped on every video clip after that, that is served from the same service and the same browsing session.
Note that at this point there is a known conflict between this plugin and AdBlock Plus exclusion lists, which necessitates disabling Adblock Plus when watching videos.
The video below shows the plugin in action:
The only thing I wish for? a version for Chrome.
[Thanks to reader Panzer for letting me know about this one]
Compatibility: Firefox 5 and 6, running on Windows 32/64bit, Mac, or Linux
Go to the plugin home page to download the latest version (approx 14.4 megs).
interesting. pretty damn cool, but it’d be even cool if it was available for chrome
Due to the complex structure of this addon (basically built like a mini program), I highly doubt that this will be availible for Chrome anytime soon. (Open the .xpi in 7-Zip and you’ll see what I mean)
ya. good point. just looked & good lord!
The problem is not complexity of AdBlock, but limitation in Chrome.
Google intentionally made it so no extension could remove anything from page, extensions can only hide it using css, in fact there is AdBlock for Google Chrome which do exactly this, hides adds, but they still get downloaded and such adds as demonstrated in this article is not hidden.
@hash That’s what I was driving at. Firefox offers a much deeper addon expeirience and more options for addon developers.
use ad muncher (http://www.admuncher.com/) if you want ad blocking for all windows applications. Ad muncher intercepts all web traffic irrespective of the app, and will block ads, as well as introductory video ads.
@ sheppo: Ad muncher not free though!!
Yeah, but admuncher is the VERY BEST at blocking ads. I swear by it. And if you use it on your main computer on your LAN and proxify things, you can block ads for every single computer you got connected
I tried Ad Muncher trial version and it is great. It is also good that someone made a portable version of it so I could use it on a USB.
But will the video you want still play if the commercial is skipped by Ad Muncher? Won’t it mess things up?