Unless I’m mistaken, none of those will block server-side ads.
Isn’t there some law that you have to visually indicate whether a given piece of content is sponsored (ad) or not? Can’t that just be detected by ad blockers to skip/hide ads?
There isn’t a law that I’m aware of, but typically the ad needs to be un-skippable/seek-able, which means there will always be some indication to the video player of what the user can skip or fast forward through.
That doesn’t mean Google couldn’t just make fast forwarding/seeking a premium feature, but they’d lose a lot of user appeal if they did so they probably wouldn’t do that
Germany has this law, sponsored segments must be clearly labelled. But one could just hash the ad anyways or just try to fast forward and if it doesn’t work and it would be the ad.
I was thinking about this. Can we crowd source add hash markers, in a similar way to how Sponsor Block opperates but with hashes instead of time stamps?
It would be pretty trivial for YouTube to change the hashes at random. Might require a clever caching workaround on their end but it’s totally possible to just flip a few bits before serving it.
Even if they do this, I wouldn’t be averse to a less on demand version of youtube. 3rd party apps will let you load a number of videos for later viewing. Would probably help me consume media more responsibly and youtube has to deal with the additional resources needed to serve all the videos I didn’t wind up watching after all.
It depends on their implementation. If they decided to somehow serve the ad itself and serve the video only after the ad is done, I think that you won’t be able to skip it, maybe only censor it to see a blank video screen or something.
I’m not sure about the mechanism, but isn’t this the same thing as ancient early DVR’s like TiVo that would record from the cable stream and omit the ads segments?
That’s the thing, I don’t think the mechanism exists (or works) yet. I’m confident it will someday, but I didn’t think it worked yet.
You can adblock twitch, I assume it wouldn’t be too different from that
IIRC, Twitch uses similar ad injection. Ad blockers get around it by opening new video streams until they find one that isn’t running an ad. Could be wrong though, I’m parroting an uncited comment.
Even then, the only fool proof way of getting around server side ads is using an adblocking proxy that pipes the video stream into a different country. And public proxies available are not foolproof because of excessive traffic or whatnot.
And specifically this is for TTV.LOL revolving around Twitch.
I think the same applies to YouTube in the same countries Twitch can’t play ads in. But I haven’t seen anything about YouTube adblocking proxies like TTV.LOL.
Why is it that they can’t play ads in certain countries?
They can block some kinds of server-side ads. And if google has those already, they have been quite successful against youtube.
But yeah, they won’t block all server-side ads.
That’s the point.
I’d be satisfied with replacing the ad segment with some other video temporarily.
Your browser just receives a single video file, there’s no way to tell where in that video there’s an ad, if there even is one
You can’t remove nor replace it if you don’t know what to remove or replace
Not yet
It’s so weird that YouTube is their second most profitable venture after adsense. It’s like they thought, we have a virtual monopoly on internet ads, Internet video, and web browsers. Let’s combine their power to make people watch non stop ads while tracking them worse than the CIA. Then, let’s be very surprised when people don’t like us and we get hit with antitrust lawsuits. Fuck Google.
Google went from don’t be evil to fuck you all.
And all they would need to do is offer a YouTube ad free plan that’s at a sensible price without any of the YouTube music crap included.
But no… They keep trying to shove the YouTube Premium bundle down our throats and no one wants it. We just want ad free.
Then, let’s be very surprised
They’re not the least bit surprised. They did the math. The profit is more than the penalty.
The mom should be Firefox and the kids the plugins.
What’s funny to me is how they are in a fight for their company with the FTC, and they want to continue provoking people by increasing their revenue on the back of their users on a service they might have a technical monopoly on? Hmmmm…
Provoking people and in dispute with FTC don’t relate but if the FTC broke them up then you would really regret not cashing in while you could
Line must go up…
YouTube isn’t profitable. You want to talk antitrust in a meme about YouTube trying to make money on ads?
Suuure it’s not.
The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes its primary use, music, pointless to me.
Another issue is Pandora, they keep forcing mobile site on Desktop User Agent setting and I work too many hours to go in and change the identifiers needed to make it work. Their app is busted as well, it asks for permissions and will semi-frequently crash when I dont give them permissions.
The whole internets basically becoming shit because of corporate incompetence. Not even willful malice, just idiocy.
That’s because they want you to pay a subscription fee for YouTube music.
For the Pandora app, they don’t want you using it if you don’t give them permission to do whatever it is they want to do.
It is malicious. It’s often incompetence too, but it’s also malicious.
Even if they benefit from me using YT Music, they make no sales pitch at any point leading up to me seeing the button is gone and leaving the platform. They are just missing out on tons of ad revenue from users that otherwise would have stayed and listened for hours.
And Pandora also assuredly did not design their app to crash.
I don’t know this for sure, but I feel like this is something you can do with freetube. Regardless, it’s worth looking into.
I don’t like using apps to start with tbh, 100% pass on that. Installing random software to phones should never have become so commonplace.
I agree. We have mobile web sites for just about everything. Apps should really only be for when the requirements are too complex for a website. Webapps are probably convenient alternative for most apps.
Hell, I can do my banking on the mobile site, so why do I need to install an app and share my phone’s contacts and precise location? Why does it need to access my phone’s storage and sensors and ability to make calls?
I use an app for local banking because the encryption is a little better and there is potential for browser addons to view the page data, but TBH I wouldn’t trust a Wells Fargo or US Bank app lol.
I run GrapheneOS, so I can more explicitly set permissions and scopes, but the app won’t run without all the permissions enabled, so I won’t use it.
The only thing the app can do that the website can’t is deposit checks with a picture, and considering how rarely I use checks, it’s not something I need an app for.
I’m on Calyx but a couple issues have made me wish I had chosen Graphene.
Fun little piece of trivia: the primary use of YouTube is not, in fact, music.
Fun little piece of trivia: my primary use of YouTube was, in fact, music, you illiterate nimrod.
Fun little piece of trivia: Originally, nimrod used to mean “skillful hunter” (after Nimrod, the biblical figure) but then in 1940 Bugs Bunny sarcastically called Elmer Fudd a “poor little nimrod", and kids of the time not knowing the reference, simply assumed it was an insult on Elmer’s character.
And that’s how a cartoon rabbit single handedly changed the meaning of a word.
That’s what’s up, Doc.
Clearly. That’s still in no way the primary intended use of YouTube because, you know, video?
You over redundant lossless head!
Lets read my statement back, abridged
its primary use … to me.
Is this like a sentence structure that doesnt exist in other languages or were a nonnegligible number of lemmings homeschooled?
I mean, it’s obvious what you meant, but that’s still awful grammar on your part.
When read properly, your wording means that you are stating that YouTubes’ primary use is music, which is useless to you.
Getting to your actual meaning requires interpreting around the literal meaning of what you wrote.
The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes its primary use, music, pointless to me.
This, my humorous fellow netizen, means:
Something AND something make the primary use (of said thing, YouTube), music (the specification of what is the primary use), pointless to me (such that I did not find said primary use any longer possible).
We know what you mean because we are charitable enought not to assume you think the primary use of youtube is music, but you fucked the wording up and I made fun of you for that.
What you wanted to say should have been phrased as it follows:
The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes my primary use, listening to music, impossible.
Now if public school in your country were better funded, you’d understand that my poking fun of you also had a different implication: it’s not that unreasonable for YouTube to stop people from sucking huge bandwith to stream videos just for the minimal amount of sound data attached.
Newpipe ftw.
Sadly, it’s only for Android.
Oh, that’s unfortunate. I’ve never looked into it on other OSs.
Peertube is holding the folded chair ready for action
Is mom stabbing herself?
That’s something like a cleaver, so it’s got a blunt tip that looks like it’s going through her blouse.
Cleaver is a bit more wide to be better at cutting through bone and stuff. I’d say its closer to a santoku knife though usually the tip is more tapered downwards
Nah the blade edge is straight and the spine curves down. Great for chopping small and medium sized vegetables.
Grayjay ftw
It works really well, I want to support them and donate but I’m afraid YouTube will find a way to block them like they did to others…
I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can’t differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can’t prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it’s an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.
Twitch already does this for their livestreams and has been doing it for years. I’m just surprised that YouTube has taken this long to get around to injecting advertisements into the video stream. Although I think if YouTube decided to try ad injection the adblocking community would fire back with something novel to thwart their efforts and the eternal arms race would continue.
I’ve read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven’t looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.
The most likely situation is just having apps that watch the content, trim the ads off, then drop it off into a folder.
You get home, watch your downloads, put it up for the night.
If there’s timed annotations (like say for closed captions or chapters/sections), then there will be some sort of mechanism to line them up with the modified stream. Then compare that with a stream without ads (which might require manually removing all ads or using a premium account where ads aren’t inserted) and you’ll be able to estimate regions of the stream where ads have been inserted. If the timed annotations are dense, you could see where the ad begins and ends just from that.
Also if the ads themselves include timed annotations, there would be a difference in that meta data that would give it away immediately.
Or if ads are supposed to be unskippable, the metadata will need to let the client know about that. Though they could also do that on the server side and just refuse to stream anything else while it’s serving an ad.
Given that, the solution might be to have a seperate program grab the steam and remove the ads for later playback. Or crowdsource that and set up torrents, though that would be exposing it to copyright implications.
I worked at a video ad server that offered a stream stitched solution going back to 2013. It comes down to development work/cost that the companies need to take on. Ultimately they would benefit from the cost required, but they wanted to be cheap and do a client side solution instead.
Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don’t know the numbers maybe it’s still cheaper.
The HLS integration we offered definitely had a premium attached to it as well as an additional cost to the CDN that required the integration to live on. So it’s not cheap.
It is weird that Google, with it’s infinite pockets, hasn’t pushed a stream stitched solution all these years until recently.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
You are correct, which goes into the cost category of doing a stream stitched integration. Also, when I left said ad server in 2016, I think I recall HLS streaming primarily supported by Apple devices. Devices like Roku’s (don’t quote me on that) didn’t support it at the time so a lot of companies looked at where the majority of their streaming was occurring and decided it wasn’t worth the hit.
As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.
There is a whole topic in wasm called server side rendered DOM.
I hardly think there is a chance to block adds when they achieve it to render all the content on their side.
I don’t like to say this, but:
AI
But unless the page ends up as just a single canvas/image you’ll still get all the HTML tags which can be stripped before your browser renders them?
There’s already SASE solutions that host a virtual browser boundary-side and present the user a painted canvas rather than the original DOM:
Ads are not always the same, not for everyone. Ads are localized in time, space and per person sometimes.
An advanced adblock would just need to download the video from two sources match the videos and eliminate the differences as those differences will surely be ads.
There are twitch adblockers, it’s just ublock origin that doesn’t work on it anymore, people did find a way.
nothing to see here :)
If they put the ads in the stream, you can just fast-forward. I don’t think it’ll work out well for Google.
This is something they are really good at, refining code until it does work well for Google.
Oh, turns out each ad is 15 seconds long per an agreement to standardize playback.
Oh, turns out you can’t skip the first 30 seconds of a video.
Oh, turns out if the first 15 seconds doesn’t play, the playback disables entirely.
~Solutions a lowly forklift repair technician came up with in five seconds.
Imagine what a Google developer might think of.
The picture missed Google’s hand of money paying Firefox
They’re the one opening the door.
With knives… thought that meant they were planning on ‘fighting’ it.
Until Google demanded from its vassal (Mozilla) the removal of support for extensions. Mozilla doesn’t have enough resources to do without Google
When did this happen?
So open themselves up for more antitrust lawsuits? Telling another browser what to do.
