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    • TheFriar ( TheFriar@lemm.ee ) 
      8·
      2 years ago

      But the point is there’s always been a way to avoid ads, even while browsing sites with ads and browsing YT. Personally, if that ability entirely disappears, i hate ads, ad-voice, and the concept of advertising so much that I will stop and close a whole tab if an ad plays. I’m in the minority though. Because, I think you’re right, a lot of people just don’t even think about it and mindlessly consume. I can’t. When Reddit fucked us and showed us our opinions and feelings didn’t matter, I left. I will do the same to YT.

    • IllNess ( IllNess@infosec.pub ) 
      7·
      2 years ago

      Plugins can add controls and it can download videos, but plugins can’t interact with videos directly I think.

      Maybe use the Youtube API closed captions and figure out the patterns for ads that way?

      • Creat ( Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
        2·
        2 years ago

        Of course they can interact with it just fine, look at “sponsorblock” plug-in. It would also solve this problem completely. It already exists and works well, it just isn’t “AI” nonsense.

        • Jeena ( jeena@piefed.jeena.net ) 
          3·
          2 years ago

          You are missing the point that sponsorblock only works without AI because everyone gets the same video delivered. Once they have targeted ads of variable length and amount you need someone to watch your specific version of the video and do the tagging where the ads ans sponsors are. You could pay someone to do it for you but that is expensive and very slow. Or you can train a ML model to recognize the patterns and tag it for you hopefully pretty fast.

        • IllNess ( IllNess@infosec.pub ) 
          2·
          2 years ago

          Yes, that is adding controls and using a database from the SponsorBlock server.

          What I mean is a plugin cannot see the video. Like you can’t write

          if(screen == adScreen) {
     then skipToNextSegment();
}

          The plugin isn’t reading the video, it is getting info from a database. For AI or machine learning to work ad injection, which might change for every user, doing what SponsorBlock is doing is not enough.

  • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) OP
    13·
    2 years ago

    YT has 2 posibilities

    • Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
    • Insert also markers which at the end also are exploited by adblockers and userscripts

    I think they’ll hit their teeth against a rock with this.

    Meanwhile a lot of content creators a changing to Odysee

    • ShortN0te ( ShortN0te@lemmy.ml ) 
      11·
      2 years ago
      • Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

      Not quite sure why, they simply could in the fly stitch those files together.

      Twitch is doing that for a while now i think.

      • kevincox ( kevincox@lemmy.ml ) 
        4·
        2 years ago

        Exactly this. It isn’t even really “stitching” as YouTube videos are served as a series of short chunks anyways. So you simply tell the player that there are a few extra chunks which happen to be ads. There is no video processing required it is basically free to do it this way on the sever side.

        • ShortN0te ( ShortN0te@lemmy.ml ) 
          2·
          2 years ago

          That is true. But then you could probably use the chunk length to determine where the ads starts and ends since there is with a very high probability an unusually long chunk at those times.

          • kevincox ( kevincox@lemmy.ml ) 
            2·
            2 years ago

            I don’t know about YouTube but the chunks are often a fixed length. For example 1 or 2 seconds. So as long as the ad itself is an even number of seconds (which YouTube can require, or just pad the add to the nearest second) so there is no concrete difference between the 1s “content” chunks vs the 1s “ad” chunks.

            If you are trying to predict the ad chunks you are probably better off doing things like detecting sudden loudness changes, different colour tones or similar. But this will always be imperfect as these could just be scene changes that happened to be chunk aligned in the content.

    • Jessica ( SayJess@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
      6·
      2 years ago

      I think they’ll hit their teeth against a rock with this.

      Press X to doubt

      Most people do not have an adblocker. Most people watch YouTube to varying degrees of frequency and duration. Most people will continue to watch the ads. I’d be surprised if YT noticed any amount of users leaving the site because of this. The privacy minded folk are few and far between.

      • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) OP
        2·
        2 years ago

        Better than any other- Well, there are some selfhosted video sites like PeerTube and others, but respect content are not a real alternative, nor other proprietary streaming sites, like removedute, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Front-ends or desktop clients (FreeTube) with the new YT policy will die. What other alternatives then?

  • edric ( scytale@lemm.ee ) English
    11·
    2 years ago

    Crap I just opened youtube today and it looks like I was chosen. The ads load like normal videos and it sucks. My brain actually glitched for a couple of seconds when I opened a video because I wasn’t used to seeing an ad. I dunno if there’s any chance uBO can even counter this.

    • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) OP
      10·
      2 years ago

      Try to watch the video embedded, simply edit it’s URL, using instead of

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx

      this URL

      https://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxxxxxx

      • edric ( scytale@lemm.ee ) English
        5·
        2 years ago

        Welp, restarted my laptop and I’m off the testing list so can’t replicate (unless I turn off uBO of course). But thanks, this will be handy if it happens again.

  • Zeke ( Zeke@fedia.io ) 
    8·
    2 years ago

    Honestly, I just pull videos from Youtube to watch later. I don’t actually watch anything on Youtube. I do wonder if there’s an upcoming replacement for Youtube like there was for Twitter.

    • illi ( illi@lemm.ee ) English
      8·
      2 years ago

      From what I read, this also breaks sponsorblock - as the ads are part of the video, it moves the time stamps of the video so it makes it not correct. The ads will also change I imagine so idk if sponsorblock will be a solution.

          • gila ( gila@lemm.ee ) English
            4·
            2 years ago

            Wouldn’t that need to be done via some kind of API for cross-platform compatibility? An API which could be exploited to detect ad segments?

              • gila ( gila@lemm.ee ) English
                2·
                2 years ago

                So that the timestamp adjustment can be propagated via uploader or user comments across YouTube clients on all platforms… i.e. to avoid having to hardcode each adjustment for each ad on each video on every client

                • relevants ( relevants@feddit.de ) 
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  Why couldn’t they just serve the comments to each client with the ad-adjusted timestamps already? The only thing the client has to request then is the comment page it wants to load, and some unique ID for which the backend remembers which ad version it’s associated with.

    • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) OP
      6·
      2 years ago

      No, not in it’s actual form, nor the front-ends can’t not longer cutting the ads with their current form. Or they change their script, or you have the alternative to use YT or using another streaming service. But I think that there will be other solution in the future to show the middle finger to YT.

    • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) OP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Not with the crrent ones, it’s easier to difference ads by code than by content in most Vids, eg, divulgations, news, influencers, etc. YT, to not destroy the own business modell, also avoiding that there later also 5 years old vids with outdated ads, must use some kind of dynamic insertion, that means, it can be discovered and skipped by some userscripts, for sure not in the extension stores, but in Greasyfork or OpenuserJS, which are independent from Google influence.

    • elgordino ( elgordino@fedia.io ) 
      7·
      2 years ago

      Because it’s actually really hard to achieve technically. When ads are served outside the stream you can easily serve different ads to different viewers based on their profiles. When the ads are baked into the stream you can either

      A) Create a whole bunch of different copies of the video asset with different ads baked in and then rotate these on a regular basis. Which would be expensive to update and store and limit the range of adverts that could be served to a particular user.

      B) Dynamically create a stream on the users request, which while possible means standard CDN caching isn’t going to work so there’s a distribution challenge.

      Or some other alternative they’ve come up with. I’d be really interest to know what their approach is here.

      • Solemn ( Solemn@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
        3·
        2 years ago

        Look up how HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) works. They just need to generate a personalized playlist for each person which points at things already hosted on CDN, and insert the ads where they want in the literal text file that your video player reads from to serve you the video.

        I don’t know much about it, but it looks like there’s specific tags designed for dynamic ad insertion. Idk if YouTube plans to use them in this case though, if they want it to be undetectable to the client.