YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete
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YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.
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There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.
I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.
A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.
There's already a filter for UBO that blocks it. That was much quicker than I expected. Works and is further down this thread.
It’s only a matter of time until YouTube stops that as well.
It's an arms race. But there's not a weapon that doesn't have a counter, even if that counter is mutually assured destruction. YouTube's efforts are inevitably a futile chase that does little more than keep their shareholders happy that they're chasing the dragon.
Possibly, but as long as they are not completely server-side (which they can't be, they want to target people) then they are fighting on hostile ground.
Of course there are attempts to lock down PCs so that ad companies can tell it what to do (probably with some DRM argument), but we're not there yet.
Then on to the next one. Google won't get a dime from me. They can't stop it, even if I have to set up something for my computer to record my videos while I sleep so I can watch them on a video player the next day, I will not watch ads.
I remember using MythTV in the beforetimes, and you'd record the show off the cable tuner, then it would process the file and remove the commercials based on volume levels and light signatures. It was remarkably good at it and was how I watched all TV until streaming came around.
I would imagine someone could do the same even better today with an AI model that would recognize all the ads and deliver an edited stream. The problem is that the video would have to be downloaded beforehand and then the streams stored elsewhere and referenced by an addon that redirects you.
This still exists today, for example in Plex's DVR. Practically everything that blocks commercials these days uses comskip or a fork of it.
if you're downloading the video locally it would be incredibly trivial to remove the segment of the ad. There are various different mechanisms i can think of that would work.
obviously, beginning and end ads are super trivial.
Ideally, youtube won't be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare, so presumably they're doing injection instead, that would be pretty obvious from the get go.
If not, they have to have some kind of interface for the advertisement you could very easily use that to track the ad placement itself, though that might be problematic.
There are likely other clever things that can be done, we'll have to see what happens.
I’m afraid this is what they’re going for.
if they did, the only way it would work is if they live encode every video on request, which as we know from twitch, is incredibly cost prohibitive. So i doubt it. This could mostly be assuaged through caching, but i'm not sure how long the economics hold up on that compared to just not doing any live encoding at all.
No, that’s not necessary. The only thing they need to do is to find an I-Frame (which there are plenty of), make a cut at that frame, show the ad instead, and then resume to the original video after the ad is done. No extra encoding is involved. It’s just like concatenating video files together.
I’ve done similar stuff like this. It’s not too difficult, at least not in H264. Not sure about YouTube’s own format, but I guess it’s quite similar.
that's what im saying. Maybe not in this thread, idk, i've had a few of these now, but they're almost certainly just injecting the AD somewhere through the middle of the video.
There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren't inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.
It's a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.
It's slightly harder to do, but not impossible.
Unfortunately I think there's been a good bit of evidence recently that people WILL accept it. As a prime example lemmy hasn't exactly replaced reddit despite the relative uproar that the API changes caused. Netflix & co just keep hiking prices and people just keep buying it.
And then on the technical side, if the ads are coming from the server it's possible youtube might just refuse to serve the rest of the video stream until all or most the ad's runtime has passed. It depends on how serious they want to get about capturing the revenue lost to adblock users.
Sure, but then that's an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.
The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.
And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.
The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don't die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself "The homepage of the internet." The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.
Reddit is still dying however. There's been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they're harder to access, now they're doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won't last forever as a culturally relevant site.
Yeah they just need to range the ad from x->y time into video playback starts.
IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.