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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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.