December 11, 2008

Permanently Disable Youtube Annotations

I'm not particularly a fan of youtube but youtube has its uses

Recenlty they have introduced annotations to vidoes which \I find to be distracting and annoying more than 'helpful'. They are like spam or pop up ad or something develish like that


Here is how to get rid of them.
  • first you need to be browsing using firefox with the adblock plus extension installed
  • open youtube and visit any video page that you know has annotations
  • right click the adblock plus icon
  • click 'open blockable items' on the context menu
  • type in 'module' in the search bar window that open at bottom of browser tab and press enter
  • right click the result* that comes up and select 'block this items'
  • close the 'open blockable item window' and reload page
* result should look something like this :
http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/iv_module-vfl68978.swf

no more annotations ...!

from now on all youtube videos in your browser have no annotations!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thankyou! Will definitely give that a try. What were youtube thinking when they introduced this???

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for these instructions. Annotations have suddenly multiplied the annoyance factor of any video by 100.

diddy47 said...

hiya...glad you found these instructions helpful

Cypherswipe said...

Adding iv_module to my blocklist doesn't work, it's getting bypassed somehow. However, this post did lead me to a highly effective solution. Use something such as proxomitron (my preferred option) or a greasemonkey script to find "iv_module" in the page's source & replace it with anything else. This causes the player to try to load "bite_me.swf" instead of "iv_module.swf", which obviously fails & doesn't produce those damnable annotations.

Pissed off dude said...

Thank goodness for this.
No more crappy popups ruining my youtube experience.
I used to rate every video with annotations 1 star as revenge.
And that's a lot.

Anonymous said...

Didn't work disabled the youtube video itself and had a heck of a time re enabling it

diddy47 said...

i am sorry to say but you forgot one of the steps

after you clicked disable this item
you were presented with a similar dialogue box like the one in the bit url

http://bit.ly/diabox

you should have selected the one above the one selected by default

if you went on to click "Add Filter" without changing this then this will disable all swf elements on the page not just the annotations swf element...as indicated by

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/*

please try again and select SPECIFICITY the module address as it appears in the search box

it should be something like this

http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/iv_module-vfl68978.swf

as shown in the box after you type in "module"

Anonymous said...

awesome, thanks!

Anonymous said...

Hey hello! and THANK YOU

This works for me until I close the browser (FF)

When I open the browser again, ad bloc has "forgotten the filter and I have to enter it all over again.

Any ideas?