Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf (2022)
(ericdraken.com)
I discovered that putting a man-in-the-middle proxy between my Apple TV and the world lets me decrypt HTTPS traffic. From there, I can read the Protocol Buffer data Google uses to populate YouTube with ads. It is too CPU-intensive to decode Protobuf on the fly, so instead, I found a flaw in the Protobuf format which allows me to reliably change one byte to obliterate ads.
I discovered that putting a man-in-the-middle proxy between my Apple TV and the world lets me decrypt HTTPS traffic. From there, I can read the Protocol Buffer data Google uses to populate YouTube with ads. It is too CPU-intensive to decode Protobuf on the fly, so instead, I found a flaw in the Protobuf format which allows me to reliably change one byte to obliterate ads.