Olympic coverage from the USA

The Olympic coverage from the USA is ridiculous. NBC does the worst job ever. Almost nothing's live on TV, the evening coverages are only about Americans. After almost 2 years I know now why Americans don't know anything about the rest of the world, and the media is the one to blame: 8 runners, one is on Team USA, they don't even show the faces, names of the other 7... And that applies to all the sports.

At least they have their website where they broadcasting live on YouTube all the video streams by the Olympic Broadcast Services. American races and games with American commentator, of course... So I can watch all the water polo games and other Hungarian events live, and that's a good thing!

Now the Internet stream is filled with ads. Like every minute. Sometimes the actual happenings are not even taken into account, and they broadcast a 10 second ad block in the middle of a game. I figured, that at my workplace there's no ads. They applied recently a filtering system that blocks certain sites (like memebase for which I'm furious) and all the ads. All of them, everywhere!

So it is possible to block YouTube video stream ads! First I was trying it using the URL filter of my router. I was recording the HTTP requests with Tamper Data, and found the domains where these streaming ads came from. But that didn't seem to be sophisticated enough: there were no ads, but the live stream was not served as well. So I went with the crowd and installed AdBlock Plus in my Firefox.

By default it doesn't work on YouTube streams but there's a guy who seems to know what he's doing, and he explained in a forum entry what to do! So I've added the custom filters to my settings:

In case you don't want to type those rules in, here they are for copy-paste:

• ||http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/ad-
• ||c.youtube.com$~object_subrequest
• doubleclick$domain=youtube.com
• google$third-party,domain=youtube.com

Well I just started a stream in my Firefox while we were watching the Pommel Horse Finals (congrats to Krisztián, winning our 3rd gold medal!) on IE. I had to watch it on IE, because the ads crash Flash Player on Firefox and chrome full screen YouTube exits if I move the focus to another window...So in that stream for 5-10 mins I didn't see ads.

We'll see how it performs later on the men's Hammer Throw Finals!

UPDATE: It works! Hammer throw finals, not a single millisecond of ads!