- 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.
I’ll just write a greasemonkey script that detects unskippable time and mute audio. Let’s play this game google, fuckin I dare ya.
Can you have it replace the video screen portion with cat videos from another source during the unskippable part?
Sure, popover video of cute cats and turtles eating strawberries
Instant millions of installs
At this point you can just replace the video with the same video using a timestamped link from just before the ad started. Under IPv4 they can’t tell if it is the same person/device requesting the same video. So unless they put the ad at exactly the same timestamp (which they won’t) you can just blank out the video when an ad starts and replace the stream with the same video using the timestamp to start the video where you left off.
But think of the cats!!!
I’m pretty sure ads will likely be different audio level or light level that would be detectable. If there is no option to detect the ad via API that would be one way to know when the ads begin and end.
The idea here is that ads will be unskippable, aka, you skip ahead 10-20 seconds but can’t. They’re will be controls that appear to catch this. If they incorporate ads and I can just fast forward, then who cares. This is google, they want to watch ads.
Even if it becomes impossible to block the ads out I will cover my ears, close my eyes and shout ‘lalala’ to avoid them.
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An appropriate response to this nonsense.
Or use it to implement a script that just downloads the video and cuts the ads out entirely for later watching.
Or, failing any of those, a script that pops up a reminder that YouTube has unskippable ads so you can back out and just do something else with your time.
Enjoying YouTube is quickly becoming a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze
Drink the Kool-aid instead and join Premium. It’s great. YouTube is my primary source of video entertainment. No ads on any device and countless thousands of hours of math and science videos, SNL clips, educational videos, game reviews, and on and on.
For the cost of two beers a month, I get access to the best video library in the world with no ads, plus saved video progress so you can resume videos later, and YouTube Music to boot.
Why everyone on Lemmy thinks everything in the world should be free when it costs money to run the servers and pay content creators is beyond me. Makes no sense.
You sound like an ad. It triggered my uncanny valley response. Please never do that again.
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Edgy
as an occasional creator of internet videos,I would much rather host my own videos, because bandwidth is actually very cheap. but YouTube has a complete monopoly on internet video, so I have to host my video on their website, subject to their weird and arbitrary conditions, their trigger happy copyright system, and their general terrible treatment of their creators. they pay an absolute pittance for impressions, which is why most professional YouTubers use other revenue streams
the company, Google, that you are paying, didn’t make the videos, doesn’t fairly compensate the people who did, and they are effectively holding them and the very concept of internet video hostage
people on Lemmy mostly support a free, non-corpo, decentralised internet instead of the parasites at Google because Lemmy is free and decentralised and non corporate
get real
I signed up for a family plan a couple years ago and it’s honestly one of the last subscriptions I would cancel. I can justify it by the literally hundreds of hours of watching ads me and my family would have been subjected to otherwise.
I think you missed a “not” in your last sentence
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I prefer subscription models. That way I’m paying with my money and not my content. Of course with Google you’re doing both… but in principle I support it. I pay for a family plan and have some friends/ family on it.
It hate ads and to me it’s easily worth the monthly fee. I looked up a YouTube video on a TV that wasn’t signed in and there was like 60 seconds of ads! I’ve had YouTube premium / red for years I didn’t realize it was getting so bad.
But yeah, I support subscription model. More sustainable and honest way for a website to make a profit. In a subscription you are the buyer and the website is the product. In a free model ad companies are the buyer and you are the product.
They have more incentive under the subscription model to create a better experience for the user. In a free they have incentive to squeeze user as much as possible. I think it’s one of the main drivers of enshittification
I use premium and even I cringed at this. The first two thirds of this are written like an AI generated ad.
I pay for YouTube. It is without a doubt the best subscription I pay for, that I get major use out of. I know people are hardcore anti-ad and Google is like Ad Satan, but if you can afford it, YouTube is unironically worth it.
The monthly payment for my family subscription is less than 2 tickets to the movies, not including gas, popcorn, kids, etc.
Easily the most bang for the buck entertainment we get, we watch hours of YouTube every day. News, tech reviews, travel, kids songs, tutorials…
I canceled Disney+ and Netflix, but YouTube premium is not going anywhere.
And I’m testing no longer using YouTube.
Cable was gone years ago, followed by all streaming. Soon all I’ll have left are games and hobbies.
EA has been on the boycott list since mass effect 3
Can’t inject shitty ads in my mountain of board games.
If it’s built into the video I watch in mpv can’t I just skip?
Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it’s the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I’ll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there’s something better I should be doing.
Good idea. 1.2x speed is how I save time on videos I expect to be long
This wouldn’t be a problem IF content creators were paid a fair share. I wouldn’t actually mind ads nearly as much knowing that the channels I enjoy watching were getting paid reasonably for every ad that I watched. Google has the technology to make it possible.
Also if the ads were actually curated and we didn’t have crypto scams running amok
Why should I pay or watch ads to listen to someone tell me I need to • like and subscribe • who’s sponsoring them • a life story
… before getting to the small percentage of possible useful information therein?
I’ve taken to using Ai to summarize video content just to be able to review if the video even contains an answer or information which is relevant.
I know I’m just one use case, that I don’t watch a ton of other content. It’s usually how to do something or fix something or configuration of something. I’ve sat through countless ads and videos which just wasted my time and left me frustrated trying to find information.
Panning for gold through endless kaka.
As is, I can’t make it through a 30 sec ad. I will peace out 100% of the time.
It sounds like this would be easy for tools like SponsorBlock to label and skip segments as ads. However, it would be tough on smaller channels where people might not be labeling them as such.
If only I had a client with support for fast forward… Oh right. I do. Neat.
Some people said that skipping is blocked during the ad. But if that is the case I am sure either the timestamp is predictable or somewhere on the client side you could find the information about the timestamp.
My client pre-downloads videos, so I can fast forward and rewind at will.
Google’s own Shaka sdk (video playback with ads) gives ad markers in the initial video manifest so that they can be marked on the timeline, so hopefully it’ll be trivial. Usually (but not always) with SSAI, the ads are spliced into the stream just before being sent to the client. That way if a user has just recently watched an ad pod, the server can choose to ignore that marker for a better UX in hopes that they don’t bounce if ads are too frequent.
I doubt it… They couldn’t even manage to block FFWD on their own website for the longest time. I switched to using alternative front ends long ago, but back when I just used YT directly from my phone’s browser, spam tapping +5s a few times would bypass the ad.
community driven skippable timestamps and remove click bait thumbnails.
How likely we can defeat it with something similar to YT’s own ContentID system? We download a tons of ads, process it with feature extraction, and match it on the fly to carve out those ads. A similar system to SB can be used to let people mark where the ads is, process, and share.
Ads should be properly labeled in most market, so it should be trivial to detect what segment is ad and what isn’t. The real question is, what to do, and if the server refuses to serve the remainder of the video before the ads duration, what will it be replaced with.
I doubt if they will refuse to serve as the stream still need to buffer. That’s the fundemental of streaming.
Or I missed something?
Streaming allow caching a bit ahead, yes. But the “a bit ahead” part does not mean you can get everything; a server could very well decide to not send more than a few seconds of buffer compared to the realtime play. So, if you’re at 00:00:20 in your video and an 30 second ad is present in the video stream, the server could decide to not send anything beyond the 00:00:55 tag until 30 seconds have elapsed, for example.
It would be very annoying to code server side, and very annoying for people with spotty internet, but it’s very doable.
Guess I’ll just be blocking YouTube.com on my DNS server and all subsequent Google URLs. I am fed up with their nonsense anyway.
- They don’t care because you aren’t watching ads anyways.
- Where are you going to watch videos now?
Oh I just won’t in the future. Like I already ripped discord out of my life alongside most social media. Meaning I’m capable of doing it with YouTube as well especially as I was terminally online on discord. Plus I have literally infinite media to consume anyway via piracy and games on steam to get to alongside the odd source port or two.
I will say, I don’t know what they’ve done but it’s been fucking up my casual circumvention nicely. Now I just get forced into almost 10 minutes of ads every time, and the ad bars shows up underneath videos, the end cards at the wrong time…
Reloading usually works, but gets old.
Mobile Firefox seems to still work
This is really putting a dent in my enjoyment of YouTube
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