One of the most annoying things on YouTube is channel trailer videos on the channel profile page. It’s auto-played and it would get into your watch history and possibly cause unwanted recommendation videos, all when you just get a link of a channel and you are still not sure that the channel is about.

So, in order to avoid it, I had a habit to click on About or Video tabs right away before the video player is ready to play the channel’s trailer video.

1   Using Pentadactyl

Since I use Pentadactyl, it’s only reasonable to utilize it to deal with those channel trailers. I used to use AdBlock to handle this, but it had not been working for some time.

It took me a while to find out which element is my target, finally I spot .c4-player-container,


<div class="c4-player-container  c4-flexible-player-container">

Using DOMLoad event to remove it as the following.


autocmd DOMLoad '^https://www\.youtube\.com/(channel|user)/\w+(/featured){0,1}' :js <doc>.getElementsByClassName('c4-player-container')[0].remove();

There a few types of links that might have a channel trailer:


https://www.youtube.com/channel/[ID]
https://www.youtube.com/channel/[ID]/featured
https://www.youtube.com/user/[ID]
https://www.youtube.com/user/[ID]/featured

2   Using AdBlock (no longer working)

Note

This was what I used to do, but it had not been working for some time after changes to YouTube. (2015-11-07T20:13:06Z)

I finally decided to deal with this with AdBlock Pro. If you have HTML5 Player enabled, then add the following to blocking rule:


||youtube.com/html5_player_template

For Flash player:


||s.ytimg.com/yts/swfbin/player-vflqv4MLv/watch_as3.swf$domain=youtube.com

Note

The $domain=youtube.com limits the filter only affecting on YouTube, this resource seems to be used in embedding player.

The EasyList I subscribed to whitelists this URL, so you may need to bring up Ctrl + Shift + V to disable the whitelist entry in order to have our own rule being effective. Also note that the string vflqv4MLv might change over time, you may need to adjust. Just search swfbin in the HTML to see the new string if that ever happens.

Also, I’d hope you add an exception rule for video pages like I said in my previous post about my thoughts towards ads:


@@|http://www.youtube.com/watch?$document

I watch ads on YouTube because of the channels I have subscribed to.

The trailer video is really annoying among other things, why can’t YouTube stop auto-playing such videos? There is no such option, I have to resort the issue with an ad blocker. There is no ad playing in channel trailer videos, don’t they realize it’s not a video page and such behavior only increase annoyance for people do care about the usage?

When someone visits a channel profile page, most likely a new users to the channel, who ain’t familiar with. But with some quick skimming, it’s easy to decide if the user wants to watch more or not.

YouTube shouldn’t decide for the user by auto-playing a video, not to mention many of trailer videos ain’t really good to represent what the channels are about.

Finally, some peace and quiet in channel profiles…