Twitch Adblock Userscript

Maintained Twitch ad-blocking userscript based on the archived vaft implementation from pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions.

This maintained version keeps the original HLS interception approach, ports proven fixes from maintained descendants, and adds reliability hardening, safer codec handling, standalone ad-video resilience, configurable fallback behavior, automatic quality handling, and runtime diagnostics.

Install

1. Install Violentmonkey or Tampermonkey.
2. Disable or remove any other vaft copy first, including userscripts or the uBO vaft-ublock-origin.js scriptlet. A different filename will not be replaced automatically.
3. Open twitch-adblock.user.js and confirm installation.

Updates are delivered through the userscript @version metadata.

The internal ourTwitchAdSolutionsVersion=24 guard prevents multiple incompatible VAFT copies from running at the same time. It is not the public release version.

Features

VAFT core

• Detects Twitch stitched-ad HLS playlists.
• Tries clean backup player feeds while preserving resolution and codec family where possible.
• Uses embed and popout Source feeds first, with optional autoplay 360p fallback.
• Strips remaining ad segments when required.
• Treats AVC, HEVC, and AV1 explicitly instead of assuming every high-quality stream is AVC/HEVC.
• Never injects the hard-coded AVC blank segment into an HEVC/AV1 playlist.
• Reloads the player only when necessary, otherwise uses pause/play recovery after ads.

Standalone Twitch ad videos

Twitch can render client-side ad <video> elements beside the player or in chat, outside the HLS stream VAFT normally processes.

The maintained userscript:

• identifies these standalone videos by Twitch's media-amazon.com ad-CDN source;
• hides, mutes, and pauses them without targeting the real player;
• avoids treating the first <video> in DOM order as the primary stream;
• restores a video node if Twitch later recycles it for normal content;
• routes auto-quality and visibility recovery through the actual player video.

Ad fallback mode

A small control is added next to Twitch's Share button:

• 360p: use the 360p backup stream if both Source backup feeds still contain ads.
• Source: never intentionally downscale to 360p. If all Source feeds are tainted, the picture may freeze until the ad window ends.

The setting is stored as localStorage.adBackupMode and synchronized between tabs.

Console API:

setAdBackupMode('360p')
setAdBackupMode('source')

Automatic quality

The same control bar includes Auto / Off quality handling.

When enabled, VAFT prefers:

1440p60 > 1080p60 > 1440p > 1080p

It only intervenes when the current player video is below 1080p. Temporary UI failures are retried instead of permanently marking the attempt as complete.

Console API:

setAutoQuality('on')
setAutoQuality('off')
getAutoQuality()

Playback recovery

• Suppresses Twitch ad banner/countdown UI.
• Uses pause/play after an ad when a full reload is unnecessary.
• Reloads after stripped segments or enhanced-codec transitions when required.
• Detects stuck playback and attempts recovery.
• After returning to a backgrounded tab, catches up excessive live latency with pause/play when needed.
• Avoids injecting VAFT hooks a second time into a Twitch worker that already carries them.

CSAI diagnostics and optional blocking

Twitch also makes client-side ad requests to edge.ads.twitch.tv. These requests are outside the HLS/SSAI path.

Since 37.6.0, VAFT observes and counts these requests for both fetch and XMLHttpRequest. Blocking is off by default. This gives useful field diagnostics without automatically taking on the detection/compatibility trade-off of network-level CSAI blocking.

Enable blocking explicitly:

setCsaiBlocking(true)

Disable it again:

setCsaiBlocking(false)

Check the current setting:

getCsaiBlocking()

The setting is persisted as:

localStorage.twitchAdSolutions_blockCsaiAdRequests

When enabled, matching Fetch requests reject like a network failure and matching XHR requests finish with a network-error-style status: 0 path. Non-CSAI requests, including Twitch GQL, continue through the normal hook.

Diagnostics

Run this in the Twitch page console:

vaftStatus()

Example:

{
  version: '37.6.0',
  workerCount: 2,
  backupMode: '360p',
  autoQuality: 'on',
  blockCsaiAdRequests: false,
  csai: {
    total: 3,
    blocked: 0,
    allowed: 3,
    fetch: 2,
    xhr: 1,
    preroll: 1,
    midroll: 2,
    unknown: 0
  },
  channel: 'examplechannel',
  showingAd: false,
  strippingSegments: false,
  backupPlayerType: null,
  lastPlayerReload: 1729200000000,
  numStrippedAdSegments: 0,
  isMidroll: false,
  lastUpdate: 1729200001000
}

Fields:

• workerCount: currently tracked Twitch workers.
• backupMode: current Source/360p fallback policy.
• autoQuality: automatic quality mode.
• blockCsaiAdRequests: whether optional CSAI network blocking is enabled.
• csai.total: observed edge.ads.twitch.tv requests in this page session.
• csai.blocked / csai.allowed: observed requests split by action.
• csai.fetch / csai.xhr: observed requests split by transport.
• csai.preroll / csai.midroll / csai.unknown: observed requests split by break type.
• channel: channel reported by the active worker stream state.
• showingAd: whether the worker currently sees an HLS ad window.
• strippingSegments: whether HLS ad segments are currently being stripped.
• backupPlayerType: active backup player type, such as embed, popout, or autoplay.
• lastPlayerReload: timestamp of the most recent VAFT-triggered player reload.
• numStrippedAdSegments: number of stripped ad segments in the current state.
• isMidroll: whether the current worker ad state is a midroll.
• lastUpdate: timestamp of the most recent worker-to-page diagnostics update.

Since 37.4.1, the HLS stream fields come from the worker that actually processes the playlists instead of the page-local StreamInfos copy.

Debug helpers:

simulateAds(1)          // simulate backup-player depth
simulateAds(0)          // disable simulation
allSegmentsAreAdSegments()
reloadTwitchPlayer()

Troubleshooting

Script appears inactive

Make sure no second VAFT-based userscript or uBO scriptlet is loading first. The internal conflict guard intentionally disables duplicate copies.

Check:

vaftStatus()

A non-zero workerCount means the worker hook is active.

Ads cause a quality drop

Use Source mode if you prefer freezing over falling back to the 360p backup feed:

setAdBackupMode('source')

Switch back with:

setAdBackupMode('360p')

Side/chat ad slot appears

Check vaftStatus().csai. A rising CSAI counter with no corresponding HLS showingAd state indicates client-side ad activity that the playlist layer does not see.

Standalone media-amazon.com ad videos are hidden automatically. If you explicitly want to test network-level CSAI blocking as well:

setCsaiBlocking(true)

If Twitch behavior becomes worse, disable it again and include the csai counters in the bug report.

Player hangs, goes black, or reloads unexpectedly

Capture vaftStatus() while the issue is happening and include relevant console messages. In particular, note:

• channel
• showingAd
• strippingSegments
• backupPlayerType
• lastPlayerReload
• numStrippedAdSegments
• blockCsaiAdRequests
• csai
• lastUpdate

For HEVC/AV1 issues, also mention the selected Twitch quality and browser.

Reliability hardening

Compared with the archived VAFT 37.0.0 baseline, this maintained version includes fixes and hardening such as:

• Safe handling when SERVER-TIME is missing.
• Correct application of ad tracking URL rewrites.
• Playlist request failures reject instead of hanging forever.
• Reduced React-tree scanning on pages without video.
• Safe cached playlist freshness checks through getFirstM3u8Url().
• Native hidden-tab detection preserved even though Twitch visibility state is patched.
• Fetch handling supports strings, Request, URL, Headers, and missing init values more safely.
• Malformed PlaybackAccessToken JSON no longer breaks the fetch hook.
• Worker blob URLs are revoked after construction.
• Terminated or inactive workers are removed from tracking.
• Worker-to-page fetch requests time out after 15 seconds instead of leaking forever.
• Workers already containing VAFT hooks are not injected a second time.
• Signed/query-string .m3u8 URLs are accepted.
• Missing or mixed-order codec metadata is tolerated.
• AVC, HEVC, and AV1 are classified explicitly.
• Same-family backup renditions are preferred before cross-codec fallback.
• Enhanced-codec playlists never receive the AVC blank segment.
• Standalone Twitch ad videos cannot become the primary-video target merely because of DOM order.
• Recycled ad video nodes are restored when Twitch reuses them for content.
• RequestedAds is bounded to avoid unbounded growth.
• Auto-quality retries after transient failures and always clears its busy state.
• Worker-side runtime state is bridged into vaftStatus().
• CSAI requests are counted by transport and break type, with optional explicit network blocking.

Development

Run the regression checks with:

node check.js

The suite covers fetch normalization, HLS parsing, codec-family safety, enhanced-segment handling, worker lifecycle behavior, standalone-video targeting/restoration, CSAI Fetch/XHR handling, auto-quality state, and runtime diagnostics.

Versioning:

• @version is the public userscript release version and must be bumped for user-visible changes.
• ourTwitchAdSolutionsVersion=24 is an internal compatibility/conflict guard and should only change if that protocol changes.

Typical release flow:

node check.js
git commit
git tag vX.Y.Z
git push
git push origin vX.Y.Z

Provenance

This repository is a focused maintained userscript, not a full fork of the original TwitchAdSolutions repository structure.

Lineage:

pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions vaft 37.0.0 (archived)
        -> proven fixes from maintained descendants
        -> Wibias/twitch-adblock-userscript reliability and diagnostics work

The archived upstream remains the baseline and primary provenance source. Credit is preserved for the original VAFT and VideoAdBlockForTwitch contributors.

Limits

• Targets Twitch pages under *.twitch.tv, primarily desktop www.twitch.tv.
• CSAI network blocking is experimental and intentionally opt-in.
• Page-context code cannot control every browser-, extension-, or cross-origin-frame behavior Twitch may use.
• Twitch changes its player and delivery stack frequently, so breakage can happen without warning.
• This project is not affiliated with Twitch.

Credits: pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions and VideoAdBlockForTwitch.

License: MIT