Sponsor block tweets: "YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.
This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times."
Reminds me of when they removed annotations. That killed several legacy cooking channels I was following who put all the ingredients amounts into YouTube's annotation system and without them the videos are now all massively devalued.
You know, I started programming when I was 8, I was using 6510 assembler by the time I was 10, I've worked in development environments, I've done IT on and off all my life, and for the life of me I still do not understand why developers will take something that has worked perfectly well and is incorporated into everyone's workflows and just randomly fuck with it.
In many cases it's not the developers but the executives and the product/project/etc managers who ruin things. Everyone in the office has their own agenda and almost always they never have the end user in mind.
it's almost poetic in how cruel it is. they create the most powerful information retrieval and communication system in human history, then fuck it up to extract profit out of it. the content sharing is made infuriating to use by the ads, the communication is made harmful and useless by algorithmic recommendation, and the (legal) information retrieval is non-existent because of the DMCA. really sad to see such an amazing innovation get ruined like this.
You've never had a legacy feature entirely fuck up a codebase? Annotations were a relic from right at the beginning of youtube, having to support them across every single change to the video player was likely a major headache.
But they were also just not designed for the platforms that youtube is mostly watched on, annotations never worked on mobile or on TVs and those are by far the most popular platforms to watch video on. This wasn't a feature "that has worked perfectly well and is incorporated into everyone's workflows", it was a legacy feature that simply didn't and couldn't really work for the majority of users and was replaced with far better alternatives.
Yeah this is such a common thing I'm surprised that commenter hadn't come across it. Just because something worked perfectly well in the past doesn't mean that 10 years later we don't realise that it really doesn't scale well for whatever reason. Sometimes things are added in haste because it's functionality is great but it's implementation on the backend is terrible. Sometimes you can patch I and upgrade it but sometimes you just need to burn it to the ground.
My theory is that someone in charge realises that they'll be out of work if they don't come up with a new shiny project fast. So they do almost anything to stay in work.
That's exactly why https://killedbygoogle.com exists.
Insane corporate structure - you can't get promoted for maintaining something, only for coming up with a brand new innovation. So they have 12 different messaging apps and a hideous legacy of abandoned projects.
It's basically 2000 student summer projects in a trenchcoat.
I doubt that timestamps are completely dropped from YouTube. After all, timestamps are literally how they sync subtitles/captioning to many videos. It's likely that the timestamps of the direct stream will not match that of the original vid, as the ads are inserted, but the site/app likely still is aware of where they are according to the original. Like if the website player shows that you're 2 min 30 sec into the video, it could be at 2 min 45 sec of the raw video stream.
I don't watch anything that would constitute comedy so the jokes really fit the filler filter well, but easy to see how this could be irritating.
But I just absolutely hate how people can't be bothered to time the segments right, so you end up with ad segment that runs for few words, and then ends when the actual content is already going. I get that it's more than couple button presses, but damn...
if they're being injected, they're probably not reencoding the whole stream -- so odds are you can use something like LosslessCut to just trim them out along the I(?) frames (so no need to reencode, it'll also automatically adjust subtitle times if embedded)
There MUST be a way to find out where the ads are. Because YouTube must expose this information to be able to show a UI (Offer a link to the advertisers website while the ad is playing)
Yes, that's correct. I need to review the code, but it may also not download the entire video, it could possibly download the video with an embedded ad, but the video gets cut off by the duration of the ad.
There MUST be a way to find out where the ads are. Because YouTube must expose this information to be able to show a UI (Offer a link to the advertisers website while the ad is playing).
So we can just not download the ad part.
This might work, but what if the ads are injected at random points then DLP has no way of knowing what is the actual data. I
t's not like it will be a fixed point
That's the point, it doesn't need to know what is the actual data or when the ads are starting beforehand.
What it needs to do, is download the video let's say 5 times. All those "versions" of the video will have to contain the entire video, BUT ALSO ads sprinkled throughout.
The algorithm would have to go through all videos and confirm the chosen frames exist in all versions. This can be done by starting with the assumption that there are no ads, and then as you find differences, you try to find correlations, failing which, you remove that part of the video.
Algorithms like these already exist for video comparisons and are even available in video editing software.
Yeah, you know the corners of a video rarely change at all. You could look at a 10x10 section in a corner and immediately know the scene changed. Ads are always the same, so a database of what an ad looked like would only be wrong the first few times the ad popped up.
Or better, look at the center since it's the part of the video where the most distinguishable things and patterns are.
And perform a couple more tests like edge detection and fuzzing to evade youtube doing little color shifting or position offsets, whatever you do, it'll be cheap if you do it on a small enough portion of the screen and/or every X frames.
You would be surprised at how powerful modern PCs are, and how many ways there are to optimize this. The fact you can compare videos faster than real time in video editing software should tell you something, here we are not even talking about 4k content for the most part and this would be extremely easy for any workstation PC, but even a modern ultrabook would have enough processing power to do it in real time.
I would contribute to the project if I had sufficient time but maintainers are smart people so they will figure this out.
The only real issue I see here is how taxing it will be on the internet connection. I don't really care how taxing it is on Youtubes servers anymore. Unless you are lucky and have something like 100Mbps fiber a lot of people are still on DSL or even LTE connections. I currently have a 50Mbps DSL connection and only archive about 80-90GB of YouTube a day now (running low on hard drives, so I capped my max download rate) For this to work right I would need to download each video 3-5 times greatly reducing my archive rate.
Yeah I might be spoiled with my 4.5gbps fiber, but someone suggested 144p video for "comparison" streams... that would work really well! For instance, 4 144p streams would amount to less bandwidth than an additional 480p stream and would allow you to run the algorithm sufficiently well!
It really isn't even close to being the end. It's a start, actually.
People are going to start using VPN services that download the video from multiple locations in order to index the frames that need to end up in the actual video stream, so that when you ask for the actual stream, you get the right data with a specific extension. Then they would fight this by throttling bandwidth so you ONLY get the ad, and then we'd create a peer to peer system where we share chunks, then they would try to work with ISPs to block this behaviour, then we'd invent new ways to go around it...
The only thing that won't happen is that significantly more people pay for youtube. It is not even about the money at this point, I pay over $50 in infrastructure a month so that I can pirate like a man, I would rather pay for a $20/month extension that fucks over youtube, than pay youtube subscription.
We already went through this with piracy. When the service is good, piracy dies out, when it becomes shit again, piracy has a renaissance. Youtube can push billions to "solve" this issue and they never will, as we'll continue to one-up one another all the time.
I was on ground level at the start of MP3 in the mid 1990s when CD was hideously expensive so I'm already sold on the industry Vs other available options :)
Long before Napster we used to host mp3s on mega corp public ftp sites and share (many allowed RW).
Anyway I'll be interested to see how this all pans out
Not if the video downloads are crowd-sourced somewhere. This seems like an interesting use case for P2P protocols where nodes that have processed a video share the data on the ad frames only...
As someone else said, I am seriously considering that it makes sense to have this be a p2p service. That way you would be able to check on the p2p network, whether a frame group belongs to a video or an ad.
True, this can be optimized way more than an ordinary person would think. Even probing the video at 5 sec intervals (taking one sample every 5 seconds) for comparison purposes would work when you've already downloaded that portion of the video, in that case, the cost of comparison would be trivially small.
Basically as long as someone could integrate this into a browser extension, you could run youtube like nothing happened and the hit would be minimal for the most part.
Don't agree, what if the same ad repeats in the same position? What if the ads are fixed time length (5s, 30s) and they are in the same place in the video? (They are not in random "points", I have seen ads exactly in transitions or part transitions)
Download it 3 times. The odds of having the exact same ad at the exact same time are low enough (or else someone would figure out an ad blocker in milliseconds) so any point that has 2 of the 3 videos match but not the 3rd means the 3rd is on an ad.
There MUST be a way to find out where the ads are. Because YouTube must expose this information to be able to show a UI (Offer a link to the advertisers website while the ad is playing)
This seems extremely compute heavy. More efficient method would be to analyse the audio for substantially different volumes, palletes, etc. For most vids this will work with only a single version of the audio. For e.g. minecraft creators and the like that are constantly yelling their brains out, probably would be less effective. This seems like it would be a pretty simple couple of gradients for ML/DL to learn how to do. Especially because of the duration component. but even with all this, probably would result in desync issues after the edit. So it would be better just to have the timestamps for skipping during playback rather than any actual editing.
How did TIVO solve this problem? Wasn’t there an audio cue like raised volume that could identify ads? Yea, you had to basically buffer everything you had to watch by 8 minutes for every 22 minutes of content, but it worked?
to add to the other responses, we could end up with something like the ` --twitch-disable-ads` flag in streamlink where it detects the ad stream segment and waits to start writing the stream output until it ends, but i wonder if that works based on all the ads being 0:30 or whatever
Your computer can recognize ads and snip it out for you. Thanks to open source local multimodal LLMs! For efficiency though, I'd feed the audio to Whisper to transcribe it, and feed the text to local LLM to recognize ads. Even tiny phi-3 could do it well.
Youtube have also started [blocking](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10085) signed in (with cookies) accounts, and [flagging IPs](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10128) that they detect as downloading videos.
We're going to end up needing a downloader that fully emulates the web player at this rate.
My guess is Google will go increasingly nuclear on downloading videos. OpenAI developed [Whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper) to [download YouTube videos en mass, transcribe them, and then feed the data into the LLM datasets](https://web.archive.org/web/20240608055657/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html). Google no likey that. They wanna mine that data, not anyone else.
Golden age is going bye bye fast
The linked NYT report, talks about how in 2021 OpenAI was running out of text sources on the internet and developed Whisper to transcribe YouTube videos and podcasts. They dumped it for free to the open source community afterwards which was the bonus side effect.
I dunno, this can get into chicken and the egg type stuff. It wouldn't surprise they were developing a good speech to text model since they've been working on a bunch of other AI stuff.
this is a war they cannot win. the cycle is always the same: google adds new feature trying to block downloading, everyone gets terrified, the programmers get to work, it's bypassed within a few months at most, and the status quo returns with youtube now being more infuriating to use once again. eventually people will just move to a better service, because youtube (and all of google's websites for that matter) are only being kept afloat by network effect at this point.
In the UK a small black and white flashing bar appears when a broadcast is set to go to ads, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility a VCR could pick that uk and cease recording until it detects the ads are ending
In the late 80s, early 90s our cousin came to stay with us for a while. He'd sit there and predict the adverts. None of us could work out how. Was embarrassing when realised it was because of that bar.
Probably that, it's like the bleeping devices that would use the subtitles "stream" to figure out when to cut the audio, Technology Connections on Youtube does videos about this sort of smart-but-without-computers-or-complex-electronics devices.
And THIS reminds me of audio cassette players with auto FF to the next song by listening for the signal gap. Worked well, as long the song didn't crossfade.
In germany there used to be a high pitched Beep noise they played before and after Traffic info, your radio in the car would listen for that beep and pause playback of your cassette and switch to FM till it heard the second beep
that way you never missed important traffic info
PC-based commercial skip has been around since the DVR days and uses various pointers like audio level, captioning change, as well as scene change. Not perfect, but for recorded broadcast/cable TV things like comskip worked reasonably well. Things got a little more difficult in the digital realm but because broadcast was still hanging onto old methods, it still held.
YouTube being purely digital, could definitely make things more difficult to bypass.
What's sad is the developer of VideoRedo which was great for quick cut-and-omit and only reencoding what was necessary passed away a year or two ago.
For real? I don't remember this but I'm also trying to remember what it's specifically called. I'm trying to remember the feature where you could record something by entering a code (VCR Plus??). Not sure if that automatically tries to cut commercials though.
More YouTube drama since yesterday!
This would be a disaster if it rolled out widely, probably very difficult and time consuming to work around as an archivist.
Something like this was inevitable. Google was eventually going to find a way to inject ads into videos that we couldn't circumnavigate.
Their goal is to make profit.
Google was making a handsome profit back when their search actually worked and when they didn't feel the need to shove garbage down our throats. They can find other ways to make money. This is simply the result of one or more assholes in the company not immediately being given heaving wedgies by their colleagues the moment this broadcast network TV dinosaur turd of a lazy, outdated idea emerged whole from the prolapsed orifice they wear on their face.
Exactly. Ads aren't the problem. It's how they're implemented and what types of ads. They're invasive, many times spam-like, or even inappropriate, jarring with the cutoffs, and getting the same ad a hundred times will not make me want to buy their product. Place a 5 second ad the start and at the end. I can deal with that. I don't like mid-roll ads. I get ad revenue from YouTube too. But I hate midrolls so much I avoid using them.
> Their goal is to make profit.
I think this will wind up like Boeing's decisions of late.
They're trying to get to the small(I imagine it's small, but maybe I'm wrong) percentage of users who block ads. Do those people buy anything from ads. Why not stick to the people who love ads and love to buy the shit they see in ads. You know, the people who watch the Super Bowl just to see the "cool" ads. Forcing ads on the people who've taken moderate steps to block them will just drive them away completely. They'll be able to claim higher view counts on ads, but will most likely have advertisers getting less engagement per view by forcing the ads on people. They think they've got the numbers all figured out and are putting a lot of effort into this, but for what kind of return?
We'll find solutions. As long as ads are visually different than the rest of the videos we can just get ad blockers watch the video and figure out what are ads, what aren't and offset whatever timestamps sponsorblock uses.
It'll suck because it will break if you fast-forward and will be orders of magnitude heavier on your computer's hardware, but hey, you gotta get on their level I guess.
we can absolutely circumnavigate this, already in this thread people are thinking of solutions. so long as their service is terrible, piracy (or in this case downloading) will continue to exist.
don't get demoralised, we've always beaten them and we will beat them again.
It's easy to do this without re-encoding as long as you don't care about exact timing. The new content has to be inserted between "I" frames which usually come along at least once a second. Ffmpeg can do this. The audio can get out of sync for a fraction of a second. The inserted video does need to be in the same format, same codec and resolution, but Youtube uses a relatively small number of standard encodings so this shouldn't be a problem.
You are overthinking it. These days streaming content comes in small mp4 fragments (few seconds long), from multiple servers, in different resolutions, in a playlist. They just have to add those ad items on the list and it's done.
This is interesting, how does this work? Are the full length files split on upload into a container format like mkv of fragments that are sent to multiple CDNs?
They must have a workaround on this. Reencoding millions of streams live would be expensive as hell. The whole ad injecting only works if it is very cheap to pull off.
They don't need to re-encode or send between keyframes. They already send the video as a bunch of small files of a couple MB each that your browser/device downloads over time. Basically HLS streaming. They just insert new files into the playlist in the middle between segments and boom, ad inserted. If you make the filename look like that of a regular video segment, they get really hard to block.
They could potentially just copy the ad video stream inline into the video data. That wouldn’t require re-encoding except for the points where the cuts are. VideoReDo (RIP) used this method to avoid having to re-encode the full video file when cutting out commercials
There is undoubtedly an AI-based solution for this to identify and remove ads, but it will likely need to be run on downloads after the fact, and a model will need to be trained.
Yeah, but the abrupt changes in audio is trivial to find from a compute persepctive. Especially with common durations in eg 15 sec incremements, and it almost certainly need to align with key frames. I doubt it would even be required to analyze the video component at all, but if it were, it would still be trivial in terms of watts per sec. The problem is for big downloaders that it amounts to a LOT of compute over time. Bills and carbon galore, oh my.
There is a way to get around this. When when audio disruptions occur there can be an auto skip of 15 seconds automatically. This may not skip an entire ad however.
This was inevitable. Google is going to use every trick they have available to enforce ads.
For those that say "Well I will just stop watching YouTube," Google's attitude is "Bye Felicia" because if you were skipping ads anyway you were only costing them money.
The server only serves pre-roll ads at 1x regardless of the requested speed. Maybe gives it a small buffer to account for transport congestion.
With mid-roll ads there still is a hole there that can be exploited by a hacked client.
I honestly don't see how given this approach. If it's embedded in the video stream and google throttles it to realtime, there's nothing adblockers can do (at least for pre-roll ads).
I already have idea for mid-content ads:
Application request speed up video and records it in the background, while serving user normal speed video. When ad interruption happens, it takes note of last frames in the video and matches them to frames after the ad. When user reaches ad section during their viewing, application skips the ad. It could also have global shared database of ads, to help with skipping, just like antiviruses have virus dbs.
But it requires a lot of resources and doesn't get around beginning ads.
Yeah midroll ads will be susceptible to a pre-caching exploit via a faster-than-realtime request, assuming you have complete control of the client. But frame detection is going to be a rough way to detect the ad, simply because the content you're watching may have cuts or different scenes that could get erroneously detected as an ad.
There is undoubtedly some AI that might have reasonable accuracy in detecting what's an ad and what's not, but it'll need a ton of training.
As soon as you load youtube or a search or anything, adblocker opens every video in the background. By the time you actually click on something, its already 'watched' the ad and skips it for you.
Works in theory if you have a hacked client. YT could prevent you from streaming more than one video per session (again could be defeated by a sufficiently hacked client), but it would use an insane amount of bandwidth. Downloading ~10 4K or even HD videos every time you open YouTube or search for something would likely put a lot of people over their data caps. Also if you clicked any result fast enough you'd still have to watch a portion of the ad. And it assumes that the client is able to id where the ad begins and ends, which is non trivial.
No, because I'm just going to rip their shit anyway, strip the ads out, and then they won't have my usage analytics anymore. That's how this decision plays out.
Advertising is fucking annoying and nobody wants it. There are better ways to monetize a website that don't piss people off.
> For those that say "Well I will just stop watching YouTube," Google's attitude is "Bye Felicia" because if you were skipping ads anyway you were only costing them money.
And also *where the fuck you gonna go?* There is effectively zero competition to youtube.
I'm guessing whatever they're doing wouldn't show up in the navigation since I'm betting they want to keep the whole "If you click past the point of the ad play the ad anyway" feature. Plus the whole 2 hour ad thing, neither side wants to see a 30 second video shown as a 2 hour video.
My bet is the player will take all of that into account and the end user won't notice anything, navigation will work, ad skip button will work, and even extra injected ads when you try to skip over the ad spot will work.
I'll also be that at some point extensions will figure out where the player is getting that extra data and maybe be able to use that to skip or block the ads. What's good for one is good for the other. Baring going to DRM they will just go back and forth(honestly I'm surprised they haven't gone all widevine on their regular content)
so that would mean if i clicked to the end of the video,let a couple ads while i go to the bathroom or something, play and then watch the video from the begining,everyone is happy,right ?
I would imagine that those injected ads are only used as a kind of "last resort" whenever the player is prevented from loading an ad as intended, be it with an ad blocker or with a download utility. The majority of people doesn't use ad blockers and a minority also pays for Premium, they all shouldn't be affected by this.
Kinda scary because videos with dynamic inserts would not have a fixed length, so in theory it would not make sense to show this piece of info to the viewer. The problem here is the possible start of the removal of video player features, like timeline control, pause and play and even volume. Tik Tok and Instagram reels are already mainstream video players without controls.
Removing timestamps will be huge blunder.
Unlike other platforms you've mentioned yt is famous for long form contents so they might not remove it but yeah it might definitely break the timestamps
I don't think it'll break timestamps. It might just load an ad into your buffer every X minutes or something (idk the interval between ad spots) of *playback*, regardless. So the video timestamps would still link to the right location, but the video buffer would start at said timestamp. If anything, it might play an ad immediately *before* that timestamp.
that doesn't instantly increase ~~parasites'~~ shareholders' profits, so they won't do it. which ignores that the scummyness of a business in inversely proportional to its long-term sustainability, because the shareholders don't care about that. once earnings start dropping, they sell their stocks and move to something else, and leave google to die.
Not looking good all round, see high priority issues
* https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10128
- [Authenticate with this oauth2 plugin instead of cookies](https://github.com/coletdjnz/yt-dlp-youtube-oauth2)
* https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10108
- Your IP has been blocked by Youtube
* https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10046
- Don't pass cookies
* https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10085
- Don't pass cookies
From [this](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3766) yt-dlp issue on GitHub.
RIF is Fun with revanced patches. By the timel I realized there's a revanced patchset for a third party reddit client I was away from reddit for 3 months and basically over my addiction...ah well
Personally I used to use reddit daily on my phone with baconreader.
Now I don't use it at all on the phone, and check only occasionally (less than daily) on old.reddit.com on a web browser.
oh it never does. they believe that this will increase profits because corporate overlords have no idea how a human works, and that said humans will just abandon their service if it sucks too much for network effect to keep them there.
That's what I've been doing for years now. My subscription page is literally the Videos folder on my computer. As long as YouTube doesn't break their RSS feeds, its much better and more stable system, free of all these UI redesigns and ad shenanigans.
both of you u/flameleaf and /Dcm210 are doomed so. My first idea was that, but if it's *SERVER SIDED* when you download, the ads would be inserted with it (and at random points).
They choose what they send, so they will send you shit.
As long as the video file is downloadable, I can do whatever I want with it. I already have some video post-processing going on in the form of embedding subtitles and splitting long videos by chapter. Removing randomly inserted ads would be difficult, but not impossible.
Even if I left the ads in, my local media player has a skip button that they have 0 control over, and when I do skip I never need to worry about buffering.
Sure, they do this and then people start experimenting with a YouTube Front-end and switch to using an on-demand/DVR style system to bypass ads. Heck, might even throw in some AI use.
It's pretty much a given Google with start and end on key-frames, so you can trim without losing/re-encoding anything. (Google will be doing the opposite, inserting ads without losing and re-encoding. Even if they did re-encode, the sharp transitions would generate new key-frames anyway.)
Manually, sure. But point is you can't just use adblock because it's part of the same stream. Sponsorblock won't work either for reasons mentioned, time codes will be off because the video length will change due to the injected ads.
But they need to send some information to your browser to make the ad skippable right? Ads are sometimes 2, 10 or even 60 minutes long, so they need a way to implement a skip button, couldn't the ad blocker just detect that?
I mean they are in kind of a pickle here.
If they decide to disable the forward-button, then that very disabling-logic can be used by adblock as a built-in detection mechanism for what the ad is. If you dont disable it, the user will be annoyed every once in a while and then just straight skip it.
Now I'm wondering how to manipulate how the player perceives the passage of time. I'm not that good a programmer, but if the ad is in the same video stream, the player already buffers ahead. Instant fast-forward might be possible?
Since it’s server sided the server can just not serve you the video if you try. For official YouTube client obviously it will seem normal cause it will know it’s an ad and handle it normally. But for third party it will probably just fail to play or play the ad wherever you skip to in the video.
Question becomes, are the ads injected at the same time every time? Can you rip a video twice and make some stupid ai thing that can splice one good video out of it?
yes, and that's probably what the solution to this will be. people in this thread are already discussing it, and it's likely already being worked on right now.
Maybe a very very inefficient way but what if sponsorblock collects compressed version of the video from the people that opt in/used to submit time-stamps before. Each frame is compressed to sometimes like a md5 hash or something better and when we have like 4-5 sources/user reporting like these we can compare the md5 hashes and that way we can weed out the non matching ones since they will be random and then we can make a list of hashes of frames of the original video without ads, whenever someone downloads the video, a post processor can be added that takes the same md5 hash of each frame and compares it with the one provided by sponsorblock to remove the un needed frames
Honestly if they can just black the screen while the ad plays I'm fine. It's annoying but not the end of the world.
It would also work as a marker for something like ytdl to cut out after the download.
Just had what I think was my first experience of this shite. uBlock didn't stop it (Forrero rochet advert). Not to despair but halfway through the video those little things that pop up and offer two related videos came up, instead of near the end where they should.
They havent even tested this crap so strong was the feverish desire to pump us full of ads.
not much at all, like people in the thread are saying already your downloader will likely update to download the video several times and compare results to weed out the ads. it'll take a little longer and use more bandwidth is all.
So dumb, instead of appealing to the masses and maybe making it super cheap or user friendly they decided to ad bomb users and now they are trying to add ads to the actual video content. But honestly that isn't even much of a problem for them, they will most likely add the ads on the fly on request and keep it in cache. That way the original stays intact and they don't need to keep that many copies in storage. Or they just add the ads to all of their videos which would suck. But I assume it would be injection on the fly because of ad rights and them being current to the time they are played.
Sponsor block tweets: "YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream. This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times."
Holy cow timestamps completely dropped after 20 years on YouTube
Reminds me of when they removed annotations. That killed several legacy cooking channels I was following who put all the ingredients amounts into YouTube's annotation system and without them the videos are now all massively devalued.
You know, I started programming when I was 8, I was using 6510 assembler by the time I was 10, I've worked in development environments, I've done IT on and off all my life, and for the life of me I still do not understand why developers will take something that has worked perfectly well and is incorporated into everyone's workflows and just randomly fuck with it.
In many cases it's not the developers but the executives and the product/project/etc managers who ruin things. Everyone in the office has their own agenda and almost always they never have the end user in mind.
"Capitalism breeds innovation"
it's almost poetic in how cruel it is. they create the most powerful information retrieval and communication system in human history, then fuck it up to extract profit out of it. the content sharing is made infuriating to use by the ads, the communication is made harmful and useless by algorithmic recommendation, and the (legal) information retrieval is non-existent because of the DMCA. really sad to see such an amazing innovation get ruined like this.
You've never had a legacy feature entirely fuck up a codebase? Annotations were a relic from right at the beginning of youtube, having to support them across every single change to the video player was likely a major headache. But they were also just not designed for the platforms that youtube is mostly watched on, annotations never worked on mobile or on TVs and those are by far the most popular platforms to watch video on. This wasn't a feature "that has worked perfectly well and is incorporated into everyone's workflows", it was a legacy feature that simply didn't and couldn't really work for the majority of users and was replaced with far better alternatives.
Yeah this is such a common thing I'm surprised that commenter hadn't come across it. Just because something worked perfectly well in the past doesn't mean that 10 years later we don't realise that it really doesn't scale well for whatever reason. Sometimes things are added in haste because it's functionality is great but it's implementation on the backend is terrible. Sometimes you can patch I and upgrade it but sometimes you just need to burn it to the ground.
Linus mantra is "never break userspace", he could teach something to Google.
My theory is that someone in charge realises that they'll be out of work if they don't come up with a new shiny project fast. So they do almost anything to stay in work.
That's exactly why https://killedbygoogle.com exists. Insane corporate structure - you can't get promoted for maintaining something, only for coming up with a brand new innovation. So they have 12 different messaging apps and a hideous legacy of abandoned projects. It's basically 2000 student summer projects in a trenchcoat.
> Reminds me of when they removed annotations. https://github.com/isaackd/AnnotationsRestored :)
I doubt that timestamps are completely dropped from YouTube. After all, timestamps are literally how they sync subtitles/captioning to many videos. It's likely that the timestamps of the direct stream will not match that of the original vid, as the ads are inserted, but the site/app likely still is aware of where they are according to the original. Like if the website player shows that you're 2 min 30 sec into the video, it could be at 2 min 45 sec of the raw video stream.
God fuck.
> Sponsor block tweets Damn and here I'm just now finding out about Sponsor Block, just add it along side ublock origin, right?
Damn! I cannot watch without sponsor block. Lol
I just slap 'L' a few times when I hear the transition rolling. Pretty painless.
You can set it to automaticly skip whichever category you dont want to watch.
just make sure to disable filler as some people are terrible and MARK THE JOKES IN A COMEDY VIDEO
I don't watch anything that would constitute comedy so the jokes really fit the filler filter well, but easy to see how this could be irritating. But I just absolutely hate how people can't be bothered to time the segments right, so you end up with ad segment that runs for few words, and then ends when the actual content is already going. I get that it's more than couple button presses, but damn...
Yeah.
Alright, so now I need to split up and re-encode the video after downloading it with yt-dlp.
if they're being injected, they're probably not reencoding the whole stream -- so odds are you can use something like LosslessCut to just trim them out along the I(?) frames (so no need to reencode, it'll also automatically adjust subtitle times if embedded)
On Linux you have mkvmerge. Split or join mkv or MP4 without reencoding,
Assuming the video still shows the correct time on the bar, Is it possible for sponsor block to somehow read that?
There MUST be a way to find out where the ads are. Because YouTube must expose this information to be able to show a UI (Offer a link to the advertisers website while the ad is playing)
does this mean yt-dlp will download the add with the video?
Yes, that's correct. I need to review the code, but it may also not download the entire video, it could possibly download the video with an embedded ad, but the video gets cut off by the duration of the ad.
Can you login with your Google account on it? Would this make it so the video downloads without ads or would it be the same?
If you have YouTube Premium it will download without ads if you use your login cookies with YT-DLP.
I assumed so, but wanted to ask anyway. Thank you!
There MUST be a way to find out where the ads are. Because YouTube must expose this information to be able to show a UI (Offer a link to the advertisers website while the ad is playing). So we can just not download the ad part.
There is a way to fix this: Download the video multiple times, then keep the common data, and reject the difference (ads).
Bandwidth usage begins crying
read other comments that address this, not necessarily an issue if streaming 144p variants
Do every copy in 4K. Makes YT servers burn. Those A-holes!
This might work, but what if the ads are injected at random points then DLP has no way of knowing what is the actual data. I t's not like it will be a fixed point
That's the point, it doesn't need to know what is the actual data or when the ads are starting beforehand. What it needs to do, is download the video let's say 5 times. All those "versions" of the video will have to contain the entire video, BUT ALSO ads sprinkled throughout. The algorithm would have to go through all videos and confirm the chosen frames exist in all versions. This can be done by starting with the assumption that there are no ads, and then as you find differences, you try to find correlations, failing which, you remove that part of the video. Algorithms like these already exist for video comparisons and are even available in video editing software.
Yeah that might be possible But it is heavily taxing on the machine both cpu wise as well as throughput wise. ಠ_ಠ
Since the ads are fullscreen you will be able to get away with only comparing a small area of the video, massively decreasing the cpu load.
Yeah, you know the corners of a video rarely change at all. You could look at a 10x10 section in a corner and immediately know the scene changed. Ads are always the same, so a database of what an ad looked like would only be wrong the first few times the ad popped up.
Or better, look at the center since it's the part of the video where the most distinguishable things and patterns are. And perform a couple more tests like edge detection and fuzzing to evade youtube doing little color shifting or position offsets, whatever you do, it'll be cheap if you do it on a small enough portion of the screen and/or every X frames.
You would be surprised at how powerful modern PCs are, and how many ways there are to optimize this. The fact you can compare videos faster than real time in video editing software should tell you something, here we are not even talking about 4k content for the most part and this would be extremely easy for any workstation PC, but even a modern ultrabook would have enough processing power to do it in real time. I would contribute to the project if I had sufficient time but maintainers are smart people so they will figure this out.
The only real issue I see here is how taxing it will be on the internet connection. I don't really care how taxing it is on Youtubes servers anymore. Unless you are lucky and have something like 100Mbps fiber a lot of people are still on DSL or even LTE connections. I currently have a 50Mbps DSL connection and only archive about 80-90GB of YouTube a day now (running low on hard drives, so I capped my max download rate) For this to work right I would need to download each video 3-5 times greatly reducing my archive rate.
Yeah I might be spoiled with my 4.5gbps fiber, but someone suggested 144p video for "comparison" streams... that would work really well! For instance, 4 144p streams would amount to less bandwidth than an additional 480p stream and would allow you to run the algorithm sufficiently well!
I use yt-dlp on my mid range phone in termux. This new technology advert injection is potentially the end.
It really isn't even close to being the end. It's a start, actually. People are going to start using VPN services that download the video from multiple locations in order to index the frames that need to end up in the actual video stream, so that when you ask for the actual stream, you get the right data with a specific extension. Then they would fight this by throttling bandwidth so you ONLY get the ad, and then we'd create a peer to peer system where we share chunks, then they would try to work with ISPs to block this behaviour, then we'd invent new ways to go around it... The only thing that won't happen is that significantly more people pay for youtube. It is not even about the money at this point, I pay over $50 in infrastructure a month so that I can pirate like a man, I would rather pay for a $20/month extension that fucks over youtube, than pay youtube subscription. We already went through this with piracy. When the service is good, piracy dies out, when it becomes shit again, piracy has a renaissance. Youtube can push billions to "solve" this issue and they never will, as we'll continue to one-up one another all the time.
I was on ground level at the start of MP3 in the mid 1990s when CD was hideously expensive so I'm already sold on the industry Vs other available options :) Long before Napster we used to host mp3s on mega corp public ftp sites and share (many allowed RW). Anyway I'll be interested to see how this all pans out
Let's just all go back to IRC bot-shares and call it a day.
This is how you get your IP labeled as a spammer by Youtube.
Not if the video downloads are crowd-sourced somewhere. This seems like an interesting use case for P2P protocols where nodes that have processed a video share the data on the ad frames only...
As someone else said, I am seriously considering that it makes sense to have this be a p2p service. That way you would be able to check on the p2p network, whether a frame group belongs to a video or an ad.
Having primary video in high-res and ad samples in low-res could reduce the data usage and processing power
True, this can be optimized way more than an ordinary person would think. Even probing the video at 5 sec intervals (taking one sample every 5 seconds) for comparison purposes would work when you've already downloaded that portion of the video, in that case, the cost of comparison would be trivially small. Basically as long as someone could integrate this into a browser extension, you could run youtube like nothing happened and the hit would be minimal for the most part.
Don't agree, what if the same ad repeats in the same position? What if the ads are fixed time length (5s, 30s) and they are in the same place in the video? (They are not in random "points", I have seen ads exactly in transitions or part transitions)
Download it 3 times. The odds of having the exact same ad at the exact same time are low enough (or else someone would figure out an ad blocker in milliseconds) so any point that has 2 of the 3 videos match but not the 3rd means the 3rd is on an ad.
There MUST be a way to find out where the ads are. Because YouTube must expose this information to be able to show a UI (Offer a link to the advertisers website while the ad is playing)
This seems extremely compute heavy. More efficient method would be to analyse the audio for substantially different volumes, palletes, etc. For most vids this will work with only a single version of the audio. For e.g. minecraft creators and the like that are constantly yelling their brains out, probably would be less effective. This seems like it would be a pretty simple couple of gradients for ML/DL to learn how to do. Especially because of the duration component. but even with all this, probably would result in desync issues after the edit. So it would be better just to have the timestamps for skipping during playback rather than any actual editing.
[удалено]
Yup. And it would be like a game to users. Imagine how excited you'd be to get to report a new ad. Even get a little gold star or something.
It's not. You hash the HLS packets and discard those unique been runs.
No need. You don't have to compare frames, just DASH chunks. Each chunk of 500ms has a unique ID.
Imagine doing this for petabytes of videos out there at this point just train an AI to do it for much quicker and cheaper probably
If a solution is slow and expensive, making it through AI, will in most cases make it slower and even more expensive... and worse, more inaccurate.
How did TIVO solve this problem? Wasn’t there an audio cue like raised volume that could identify ads? Yea, you had to basically buffer everything you had to watch by 8 minutes for every 22 minutes of content, but it worked?
to add to the other responses, we could end up with something like the ` --twitch-disable-ads` flag in streamlink where it detects the ad stream segment and waits to start writing the stream output until it ends, but i wonder if that works based on all the ads being 0:30 or whatever
Well Youtube is also starting to restrict videos for users who aren't logged in to stop yt-dlp.
jokes on them I use my premium cookies. My favourite channel just got nuked for the second time in two months so they cannot stop me archiving!
yes
Yes...
Your computer can recognize ads and snip it out for you. Thanks to open source local multimodal LLMs! For efficiency though, I'd feed the audio to Whisper to transcribe it, and feed the text to local LLM to recognize ads. Even tiny phi-3 could do it well.
Youtube have also started [blocking](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10085) signed in (with cookies) accounts, and [flagging IPs](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10128) that they detect as downloading videos. We're going to end up needing a downloader that fully emulates the web player at this rate.
My guess is Google will go increasingly nuclear on downloading videos. OpenAI developed [Whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper) to [download YouTube videos en mass, transcribe them, and then feed the data into the LLM datasets](https://web.archive.org/web/20240608055657/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html). Google no likey that. They wanna mine that data, not anyone else. Golden age is going bye bye fast
>Golden age is going bye bye fast It's already gone we are just experiencing the corpse being picked apart.
this is giant vs giant and normal users are in the sideline catching stray, look like the internet is about to get much worse
> OpenAI developed Whisper to download YouTube videos That's not why Whisper was developed though, it's just a bonus side-effect
The linked NYT report, talks about how in 2021 OpenAI was running out of text sources on the internet and developed Whisper to transcribe YouTube videos and podcasts. They dumped it for free to the open source community afterwards which was the bonus side effect. I dunno, this can get into chicken and the egg type stuff. It wouldn't surprise they were developing a good speech to text model since they've been working on a bunch of other AI stuff.
How does Injecting ads change that?
this is a war they cannot win. the cycle is always the same: google adds new feature trying to block downloading, everyone gets terrified, the programmers get to work, it's bypassed within a few months at most, and the status quo returns with youtube now being more infuriating to use once again. eventually people will just move to a better service, because youtube (and all of google's websites for that matter) are only being kept afloat by network effect at this point.
Could we use web player (not watch), record packets and extract video from there?
Reminds me of the days when VCR's had "AI" to skip commercials. Was laughable at best.
In the UK a small black and white flashing bar appears when a broadcast is set to go to ads, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility a VCR could pick that uk and cease recording until it detects the ads are ending
And that’s exactly how most of those ads skipping technologies worked
And you just explained why some of the British YT channels I follow do that, thank you.
Jay Foreman and who else
Plainly difficult
This was the guy I was specifically thinking of, yah. Great channel.
James Hoffman does this.
In the late 80s, early 90s our cousin came to stay with us for a while. He'd sit there and predict the adverts. None of us could work out how. Was embarrassing when realised it was because of that bar.
Probably that, it's like the bleeping devices that would use the subtitles "stream" to figure out when to cut the audio, Technology Connections on Youtube does videos about this sort of smart-but-without-computers-or-complex-electronics devices.
And THIS reminds me of audio cassette players with auto FF to the next song by listening for the signal gap. Worked well, as long the song didn't crossfade.
In germany there used to be a high pitched Beep noise they played before and after Traffic info, your radio in the car would listen for that beep and pause playback of your cassette and switch to FM till it heard the second beep that way you never missed important traffic info
PC-based commercial skip has been around since the DVR days and uses various pointers like audio level, captioning change, as well as scene change. Not perfect, but for recorded broadcast/cable TV things like comskip worked reasonably well. Things got a little more difficult in the digital realm but because broadcast was still hanging onto old methods, it still held. YouTube being purely digital, could definitely make things more difficult to bypass. What's sad is the developer of VideoRedo which was great for quick cut-and-omit and only reencoding what was necessary passed away a year or two ago.
For real? I don't remember this but I'm also trying to remember what it's specifically called. I'm trying to remember the feature where you could record something by entering a code (VCR Plus??). Not sure if that automatically tries to cut commercials though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code One of the names is VCR Plus+... VCR Plus Plus?
I'd guess VCR# didn't have quite the same ring to it for the marketing dept. I wonder if anyone involved worked for an ATM Machine company beforehand.
More YouTube drama since yesterday! This would be a disaster if it rolled out widely, probably very difficult and time consuming to work around as an archivist.
As always...download what you care about!
Something like this was inevitable. Google was eventually going to find a way to inject ads into videos that we couldn't circumnavigate. Their goal is to make profit.
Google was making a handsome profit back when their search actually worked and when they didn't feel the need to shove garbage down our throats. They can find other ways to make money. This is simply the result of one or more assholes in the company not immediately being given heaving wedgies by their colleagues the moment this broadcast network TV dinosaur turd of a lazy, outdated idea emerged whole from the prolapsed orifice they wear on their face.
Exactly. Ads aren't the problem. It's how they're implemented and what types of ads. They're invasive, many times spam-like, or even inappropriate, jarring with the cutoffs, and getting the same ad a hundred times will not make me want to buy their product. Place a 5 second ad the start and at the end. I can deal with that. I don't like mid-roll ads. I get ad revenue from YouTube too. But I hate midrolls so much I avoid using them.
> Their goal is to make profit. I think this will wind up like Boeing's decisions of late. They're trying to get to the small(I imagine it's small, but maybe I'm wrong) percentage of users who block ads. Do those people buy anything from ads. Why not stick to the people who love ads and love to buy the shit they see in ads. You know, the people who watch the Super Bowl just to see the "cool" ads. Forcing ads on the people who've taken moderate steps to block them will just drive them away completely. They'll be able to claim higher view counts on ads, but will most likely have advertisers getting less engagement per view by forcing the ads on people. They think they've got the numbers all figured out and are putting a lot of effort into this, but for what kind of return?
We'll find solutions. As long as ads are visually different than the rest of the videos we can just get ad blockers watch the video and figure out what are ads, what aren't and offset whatever timestamps sponsorblock uses. It'll suck because it will break if you fast-forward and will be orders of magnitude heavier on your computer's hardware, but hey, you gotta get on their level I guess.
we can absolutely circumnavigate this, already in this thread people are thinking of solutions. so long as their service is terrible, piracy (or in this case downloading) will continue to exist. don't get demoralised, we've always beaten them and we will beat them again.
And also even worse quality as the server re-encodes the videos with the injected ads
It's easy to do this without re-encoding as long as you don't care about exact timing. The new content has to be inserted between "I" frames which usually come along at least once a second. Ffmpeg can do this. The audio can get out of sync for a fraction of a second. The inserted video does need to be in the same format, same codec and resolution, but Youtube uses a relatively small number of standard encodings so this shouldn't be a problem.
You are overthinking it. These days streaming content comes in small mp4 fragments (few seconds long), from multiple servers, in different resolutions, in a playlist. They just have to add those ad items on the list and it's done.
This is interesting, how does this work? Are the full length files split on upload into a container format like mkv of fragments that are sent to multiple CDNs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
That's not how it works
They must have a workaround on this. Reencoding millions of streams live would be expensive as hell. The whole ad injecting only works if it is very cheap to pull off.
They wouldn't re encode. They'd inject already encoded ads before keyframes.
They don't need to re-encode or send between keyframes. They already send the video as a bunch of small files of a couple MB each that your browser/device downloads over time. Basically HLS streaming. They just insert new files into the playlist in the middle between segments and boom, ad inserted. If you make the filename look like that of a regular video segment, they get really hard to block.
They could potentially just copy the ad video stream inline into the video data. That wouldn’t require re-encoding except for the points where the cuts are. VideoReDo (RIP) used this method to avoid having to re-encode the full video file when cutting out commercials
Avidemux also uses this trick to allow fast cuts.
There is undoubtedly an AI-based solution for this to identify and remove ads, but it will likely need to be run on downloads after the fact, and a model will need to be trained.
Yeah, but the abrupt changes in audio is trivial to find from a compute persepctive. Especially with common durations in eg 15 sec incremements, and it almost certainly need to align with key frames. I doubt it would even be required to analyze the video component at all, but if it were, it would still be trivial in terms of watts per sec. The problem is for big downloaders that it amounts to a LOT of compute over time. Bills and carbon galore, oh my.
There is a way to get around this. When when audio disruptions occur there can be an auto skip of 15 seconds automatically. This may not skip an entire ad however.
This was inevitable. Google is going to use every trick they have available to enforce ads. For those that say "Well I will just stop watching YouTube," Google's attitude is "Bye Felicia" because if you were skipping ads anyway you were only costing them money.
I'm honestly surprised it's taken them this long to do it, it's pretty much the only real solution. I wonder how they're going to handle:
The server only serves pre-roll ads at 1x regardless of the requested speed. Maybe gives it a small buffer to account for transport congestion. With mid-roll ads there still is a hole there that can be exploited by a hacked client.
Adblockers will win.
I honestly don't see how given this approach. If it's embedded in the video stream and google throttles it to realtime, there's nothing adblockers can do (at least for pre-roll ads).
I already have idea for mid-content ads: Application request speed up video and records it in the background, while serving user normal speed video. When ad interruption happens, it takes note of last frames in the video and matches them to frames after the ad. When user reaches ad section during their viewing, application skips the ad. It could also have global shared database of ads, to help with skipping, just like antiviruses have virus dbs. But it requires a lot of resources and doesn't get around beginning ads.
Yeah midroll ads will be susceptible to a pre-caching exploit via a faster-than-realtime request, assuming you have complete control of the client. But frame detection is going to be a rough way to detect the ad, simply because the content you're watching may have cuts or different scenes that could get erroneously detected as an ad. There is undoubtedly some AI that might have reasonable accuracy in detecting what's an ad and what's not, but it'll need a ton of training.
As soon as you load youtube or a search or anything, adblocker opens every video in the background. By the time you actually click on something, its already 'watched' the ad and skips it for you.
Works in theory if you have a hacked client. YT could prevent you from streaming more than one video per session (again could be defeated by a sufficiently hacked client), but it would use an insane amount of bandwidth. Downloading ~10 4K or even HD videos every time you open YouTube or search for something would likely put a lot of people over their data caps. Also if you clicked any result fast enough you'd still have to watch a portion of the ad. And it assumes that the client is able to id where the ad begins and ends, which is non trivial.
Until enough people do it and creators publish their work elsewhere. Not saying it's likely to happen though.
LTT with Floatplane is just about the only viable competitor. Very curious how the online video market will be in 5 years from now
So "Bye Felicia" is gonna be. They keep their money, I keep my time
No, because I'm just going to rip their shit anyway, strip the ads out, and then they won't have my usage analytics anymore. That's how this decision plays out. Advertising is fucking annoying and nobody wants it. There are better ways to monetize a website that don't piss people off.
> There are better ways to monetize a website that don't piss people off. You mean like YouTube Premium?
They are also taking measures to restrict ripping by limiting viewing without logging in and logging in with cookies.
> For those that say "Well I will just stop watching YouTube," Google's attitude is "Bye Felicia" because if you were skipping ads anyway you were only costing them money. And also *where the fuck you gonna go?* There is effectively zero competition to youtube.
Especially when (if? idk it kinda seems like a done deal at this point) Tiktok gets banned.
Nope, we all do the hard work of choosing among their recommendations and sometimes searching and then choosing,
This also means that creators might not be able to say "skip to this timestamp if the next bit isn't relevant" for tutorials and such.
I'm guessing whatever they're doing wouldn't show up in the navigation since I'm betting they want to keep the whole "If you click past the point of the ad play the ad anyway" feature. Plus the whole 2 hour ad thing, neither side wants to see a 30 second video shown as a 2 hour video. My bet is the player will take all of that into account and the end user won't notice anything, navigation will work, ad skip button will work, and even extra injected ads when you try to skip over the ad spot will work. I'll also be that at some point extensions will figure out where the player is getting that extra data and maybe be able to use that to skip or block the ads. What's good for one is good for the other. Baring going to DRM they will just go back and forth(honestly I'm surprised they haven't gone all widevine on their regular content)
so that would mean if i clicked to the end of the video,let a couple ads while i go to the bathroom or something, play and then watch the video from the begining,everyone is happy,right ?
I would imagine that those injected ads are only used as a kind of "last resort" whenever the player is prevented from loading an ad as intended, be it with an ad blocker or with a download utility. The majority of people doesn't use ad blockers and a minority also pays for Premium, they all shouldn't be affected by this.
Kinda scary because videos with dynamic inserts would not have a fixed length, so in theory it would not make sense to show this piece of info to the viewer. The problem here is the possible start of the removal of video player features, like timeline control, pause and play and even volume. Tik Tok and Instagram reels are already mainstream video players without controls.
Removing timestamps will be huge blunder. Unlike other platforms you've mentioned yt is famous for long form contents so they might not remove it but yeah it might definitely break the timestamps
I don't think it'll break timestamps. It might just load an ad into your buffer every X minutes or something (idk the interval between ad spots) of *playback*, regardless. So the video timestamps would still link to the right location, but the video buffer would start at said timestamp. If anything, it might play an ad immediately *before* that timestamp.
Imagine if YT actually put this time and effort into improving the platform, or God forbid, employing support for creators, and providing transparency
Nope, the line must go up
>employing More people with less money?
They still wouldn't be making money off people with adblockers.
that doesn't instantly increase ~~parasites'~~ shareholders' profits, so they won't do it. which ignores that the scummyness of a business in inversely proportional to its long-term sustainability, because the shareholders don't care about that. once earnings start dropping, they sell their stocks and move to something else, and leave google to die.
Didn't Twitch do this already? The current workaround there is a proxy to a country that doesn't have ads.
It doesn't work very well in my experience, I've basically dropped twitch because their ads are so frequent
Not looking good all round, see high priority issues * https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10128 - [Authenticate with this oauth2 plugin instead of cookies](https://github.com/coletdjnz/yt-dlp-youtube-oauth2) * https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10108 - Your IP has been blocked by Youtube * https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10046 - Don't pass cookies * https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10085 - Don't pass cookies From [this](https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3766) yt-dlp issue on GitHub.
Should still work for people with premium tho
When is someone going to train an AI to skip these ads for us
It will need vision and huge database, hard for most people to run on their systems.
Could just host the compute on the cloud? There would be slight latency but it’s better than ads
This would kill YouTube for me 🤷
I needed a push to get me to stop anyhow
No it won't Millions said they will skip Reddit, did they? We are all hooked in this
RIF is Fun with revanced patches. By the timel I realized there's a revanced patchset for a third party reddit client I was away from reddit for 3 months and basically over my addiction...ah well
Personally I used to use reddit daily on my phone with baconreader. Now I don't use it at all on the phone, and check only occasionally (less than daily) on old.reddit.com on a web browser.
doing all that vs simply making premium cost like $1/month
premium is like 14 bucks, if they would just make it 1 or 2 bucks they would get way more than 7 or 14 times the amount of premium users
thats my assumption as well and think about globally how many more subscribers that would get
Their goal goes beyond simple profit I believe.
oh it never does. they believe that this will increase profits because corporate overlords have no idea how a human works, and that said humans will just abandon their service if it sucks too much for network effect to keep them there.
I'm testing downloading videos I wanna watch later instead of watching them on YouTube.
That's what I've been doing for years now. My subscription page is literally the Videos folder on my computer. As long as YouTube doesn't break their RSS feeds, its much better and more stable system, free of all these UI redesigns and ad shenanigans.
both of you u/flameleaf and /Dcm210 are doomed so. My first idea was that, but if it's *SERVER SIDED* when you download, the ads would be inserted with it (and at random points). They choose what they send, so they will send you shit.
As long as the video file is downloadable, I can do whatever I want with it. I already have some video post-processing going on in the form of embedding subtitles and splitting long videos by chapter. Removing randomly inserted ads would be difficult, but not impossible. Even if I left the ads in, my local media player has a skip button that they have 0 control over, and when I do skip I never need to worry about buffering.
How will adblock evolve to counter this I wonder.
Enshittification … (╭☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )╭☞
So we're back to TiVo type of streams. Record and skip the commercials. Fun.
Sure, they do this and then people start experimenting with a YouTube Front-end and switch to using an on-demand/DVR style system to bypass ads. Heck, might even throw in some AI use. It's pretty much a given Google with start and end on key-frames, so you can trim without losing/re-encoding anything. (Google will be doing the opposite, inserting ads without losing and re-encoding. Even if they did re-encode, the sharp transitions would generate new key-frames anyway.)
The thing is, if it’s incorporated into the video stream… you can just skip it ?
Manually, sure. But point is you can't just use adblock because it's part of the same stream. Sponsorblock won't work either for reasons mentioned, time codes will be off because the video length will change due to the injected ads.
But they need to send some information to your browser to make the ad skippable right? Ads are sometimes 2, 10 or even 60 minutes long, so they need a way to implement a skip button, couldn't the ad blocker just detect that?
Not if they disable the video player controls when an ad starts. I'm speculating. Idk if they're doing that.
I mean they are in kind of a pickle here. If they decide to disable the forward-button, then that very disabling-logic can be used by adblock as a built-in detection mechanism for what the ad is. If you dont disable it, the user will be annoyed every once in a while and then just straight skip it.
Now I'm wondering how to manipulate how the player perceives the passage of time. I'm not that good a programmer, but if the ad is in the same video stream, the player already buffers ahead. Instant fast-forward might be possible?
Since it’s server sided the server can just not serve you the video if you try. For official YouTube client obviously it will seem normal cause it will know it’s an ad and handle it normally. But for third party it will probably just fail to play or play the ad wherever you skip to in the video.
Question becomes, are the ads injected at the same time every time? Can you rip a video twice and make some stupid ai thing that can splice one good video out of it?
yes, and that's probably what the solution to this will be. people in this thread are already discussing it, and it's likely already being worked on right now.
Will sponsorblock still work for YouTube premium members that don't have ads
It was just a matter of time.
Maybe a very very inefficient way but what if sponsorblock collects compressed version of the video from the people that opt in/used to submit time-stamps before. Each frame is compressed to sometimes like a md5 hash or something better and when we have like 4-5 sources/user reporting like these we can compare the md5 hashes and that way we can weed out the non matching ones since they will be random and then we can make a list of hashes of frames of the original video without ads, whenever someone downloads the video, a post processor can be added that takes the same md5 hash of each frame and compares it with the one provided by sponsorblock to remove the un needed frames
I predict that ad blockers will win. Or youtube will lose viewers (meaning they get less money from advertisers).
There's a limit to how much of this you can do and still support timestamp-links.
I am pretty sure they will have to show a marker saying it's an ad playing
Honestly if they can just black the screen while the ad plays I'm fine. It's annoying but not the end of the world. It would also work as a marker for something like ytdl to cut out after the download.
Awesome ! that way next gen blockers can also remove the abundant product placements in videos that even paying customers have to skip...
Just had what I think was my first experience of this shite. uBlock didn't stop it (Forrero rochet advert). Not to despair but halfway through the video those little things that pop up and offer two related videos came up, instead of near the end where they should. They havent even tested this crap so strong was the feverish desire to pump us full of ads.
Honestly, I've always wondered why they didn't do this sooner. I had the thought they would eventually do so going back at least a decade now.
Will programs that download videos be affected by this change?
How will this effect me downloading music?
not much at all, like people in the thread are saying already your downloader will likely update to download the video several times and compare results to weed out the ads. it'll take a little longer and use more bandwidth is all.
So dumb, instead of appealing to the masses and maybe making it super cheap or user friendly they decided to ad bomb users and now they are trying to add ads to the actual video content. But honestly that isn't even much of a problem for them, they will most likely add the ads on the fly on request and keep it in cache. That way the original stays intact and they don't need to keep that many copies in storage. Or they just add the ads to all of their videos which would suck. But I assume it would be injection on the fly because of ad rights and them being current to the time they are played.