MLB.tv: Blocking Ads ·
5 September 2009, 14:41

I have a feeling MLB.tvs annoying advertising won’t be addressed anytime soon, if ever. So I decided to block the ads. It’s a rather simple procedure.

After doing a little HTTP sniffing, I noticed that the MLB.tv service relies on a company named Auditude (fitting name really) for their in stream advertising needs. In order to eliminate the annoying advertisements that try their hardest to blow out your speakers or brainwash you with the same repetitive content, you just have to tell your computer to make all outgoing calls to their servers fail.

Just edit your computers hosts file to redirect all auditude requests to your localhost. On my mac, I opened up Terminal and ran this command:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Once the hosts file opened, I just added these lines:

#for disabling ads on mlb.com
127.0.0.1 ad.auditude.com
127.0.0.1 asset.auditude.com
127.0.0.1 click.auditude.com

and saved it.

Viola, no more ads between innings. You’ll just see the un-intrusive and silent ‘Commercial Break in Progress’ screen. All is well in the land of streaming Tiger’s games.

EDIT: if you have a debug version of the Flash player, you will have to click ‘Dismiss All’ after the first unhandled SecurityError thrown by the MLB.tv player. It pauses playback while the dialogue box is visible, and just hitting ‘Continue’ will not suppress more of these errors throughout the stream.


☆ Jonathan Greene

comments:

  1. Thanks for the IP’s – was about to dig them out myself but did a quick search to see if someone else had found them already, appreciate you saving me a few minutes :D

    — mattc · Sep 25, 08:31 PM · #

  2. You are the man, it works. Those ads should be illegal.

    — Paul · May 10, 06:29 PM · #

  3. I love you man

    — mr · Jun 5, 08:43 PM · #

  4. Fantastic! Thank you so much!

    — Ryan A · Jul 25, 12:45 PM · #

  5. These instructions WORK…but you have to restart your computer to enjoy the changes.

    Thank you…from a SF Giants fan in Florida!

    — dave weaver · Aug 5, 07:55 PM · #

  6. I wonder….do you have a fix for NFL.com?

    — dave weaver · Aug 6, 03:57 PM · #

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