YouTube looks to be testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers
9to5google.com
- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
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Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.
If you don't know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it'd be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We'll see, I suppose.
A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you'd need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality they are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.
But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.
Usually ads have a significant volume above the content they sorround (which, by the way, is the thing annoys me the most), so you would only need to check audio for that, which is lot less load than processing the video.
Guessing you'd get a lot of false positives that way, but I like the ingenuity.
My kiddo watches stuff on youtube where the person on screen gets suddenly loud which could really mess with detecting ads by changes in volume. Apprently that is a widespread thing too.
A less expensive method could be to retrieve the subtitle twice, or the subtitle from a premium account and check where the time offsets are.
This assumes the exact same ads will be injected in the same time markers for every viewer, every time. I doubt any of these will be true.
Edit: I got this backwards...
I don't think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.
Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it's a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they're not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren't true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.
With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.
A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.
It wouldn't be trivial but it's not really new territory either. It's just assembling existing tech in a new way.
I guess saying the difference wasn't quite specific. It works by deleting everything which is not the same between the two versions of the video, all the parts that are the same in the 2 videos are kept, everything else must be an ad. It breaks down if there is the same ad at the same time on both videos.