Have you met my friend SponsorBlock?
Comment on Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months agoI feel like they’re eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you’ll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won’t be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
shrugal@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
That only works by users crowdsourcing and flagging the advert sections.
By doing it on the fly, each user could get different ads in different places.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If users are crowdsourcing what the embedded ads are, couldn’t this hypothetical situation be solved by a version of sponserblock that just learns what the content is and then cuts out any aberrations?
shrugal@lemm.ee 11 months ago
You could have an app running in the background that detects ads based on the audio (like Shazam for music) and skips it for you. I think as long as we are still in control of the playback devices we can find ways to make them skip ads.
netchami@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
There even is a project that uses machine learning to detect sponsor segments. github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Sure, you could do that.
You could also download the stream multiple times under different profiles, compare them and then strip away differences.
But we’re quickly exiting “one guy with a bit of Javascript” territory.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They can’t do that because of YouTube premium. They know they’re making a lot of money from people who don’t want to see ads.
gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
the problem is not the premium. The problem is the personalized ads.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m not talking about the EU’s issue, I’m talking about why they could never embed their own ads in videos. Because people pay for premium specifically to not see ads and they would have a mass cancellation on their hands.
yamanii@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is a non issue, on twitch if you sub to a streamer you don’t see ads and they are embed in the stream for non paying users still, and it’s pretty hard to block for free.
gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
yes. This is what I replied at. Having a version with ads and a version without ads is not that big of an issue. The issue becomes huge because the ads are personalized which means that they cannot even have a version with ads since the ads are different for each user.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Then those users would get the ad free stream.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Which users? The ones who pay for Premium? That’s the whole point of Premium.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Yes, those users.
gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
the reason they are not doing it is because the ads are personalized. So if they want to bake an ad onto a video they will end up with countless videos each on with their own unique ads which is not viable logistically. So they can only do it on-the-fly. But re-encoding each video on-the-fly for each user is also a nightmare logistically, if not impossible at all.
Spotlight7573@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Don’t they have standardized resolutions and the file broken into hundreds/thousands of parts anyways? Couldn’t they just add in ads to some of those parts in those same resolutions?
e.g: en.wikipedia.org/…/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove…
gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
isn’t this more or less what they’re doing now? The difference is that the ads are coming from different server and have an overlay on top with a timer and a skip. As long as the ads are coming from a different server they will be detectable. Also as long as the ads have overlays they are also detectable. They would need to make the ads be served from the same server that serves the video and eliminate the overlays.
shrugal@lemm.ee 11 months ago
We could build a public database (like SponsorBlock) of known ad video slices and detect them that way.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
I don’t think you’d need to re-encode the whole thing on the fly. More frigging the container data around, than the video/audio codec itself.
That way I could request some_pointless_video.mp4 and it sends me 95% the same thing as is already on their server, with adverts jammed into it at defined intervals.
They probably think they can win for now by messing with individual ad-blockers, but with 3rd party players becoming more popular, I can see that being a catch-all solution.
gohixo9650@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
isn’t this more or less what they’re doing now? The difference is that the ads are coming from different server and have an overlay on top with a timer and a skip. As long as the ads are coming from a different server they will be detectable. Also as long as the ads have overlays they are also detectable. They would need to make the ads be served from the same server that serves the video and eliminate the overlays.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
That’s the difference. The ads are coming from somewhere else and displayed in a different way.
By injecting it into the stream, there’s no way to detect that. To your player it would all look like it’s coming from the same place. Instead of a ten minute video and a couple of 20 second ads, it’s now just 11 minutes of video.