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submitted 6 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] Rolando@lemmy.world 197 points 6 months ago

some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.

Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.

[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 43 points 5 months ago

What would be terrifying about it?

[-] deranger@sh.itjust.works 60 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.

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[-] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 38 points 6 months ago

That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.

The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.

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[-] Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 171 points 6 months ago

Humanity accepts your challenge! See y'all on the battlefield ;-)

[-] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 59 points 6 months ago

lights molotov cocktail

...

"are we not going to do that, or....? asking for a friend, of course"

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[-] ours@lemmy.world 120 points 6 months ago

This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.

[-] Etterra@lemmy.world 45 points 6 months ago

There's already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won't even take that long.

[-] daddy32@lemmy.world 85 points 6 months ago

That's "crowdsourced", i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.

[-] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 25 points 6 months ago

I see a good use case for AI, can also be crowd sourced.

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[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 41 points 6 months ago

Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it's inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn't corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.

But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it's like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it's even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it's able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.

Ad blockers will find a way.

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[-] gressen@lemm.ee 117 points 5 months ago

YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube

[-] andrade@infosec.pub 116 points 5 months ago

Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.

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[-] Rinox@feddit.it 91 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can't be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you'll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It's called SSAP, and I've been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they've pretty much broken their player to implement this.

Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here

Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can't guarantee for much more.

edit: fixed wording

[-] Dasnap@lemmy.world 40 points 5 months ago

Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?

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[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee 84 points 5 months ago

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

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[-] Emerald@lemmy.world 72 points 5 months ago

Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over

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[-] danc4498@lemmy.world 69 points 5 months ago

And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?

[-] hellequin67@lemm.ee 68 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.

If I can't watch with adblock I'll just stop using it, it's only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.

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[-] polle@feddit.de 68 points 5 months ago

Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.

[-] cRazi_man@lemm.ee 63 points 5 months ago

Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.

[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 42 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?

I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.

Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.

Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.

Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.

Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.

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[-] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago

It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.

And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?

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[-] my_hat_stinks@programming.dev 62 points 6 months ago

My gut reaction is that this won't work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there's a way to do that there's a way to detect ads.

Of course, there's always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they're used; they've done similar before.

[-] Lemminary@lemmy.world 28 points 6 months ago

Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.

The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.

It sounds like there's a silver lining after all.

[-] 4am@lemm.ee 25 points 5 months ago

The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.

But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.

This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.

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[-] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 61 points 6 months ago

I mean, I'll just continue to not use Youtube...

[-] Beaver@lemmy.ca 45 points 6 months ago

I will see you on peertube ;)

[-] original_reader@lemm.ee 37 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I really wish this would gain some traction. As it is, there is just not enough content there to compete with YouTube in any reasonable way.

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[-] MrSoup@lemmy.zip 60 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I don't see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.

Can anyone correct me on this?

Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?

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[-] Th4tGuyII@fedia.io 55 points 6 months ago

I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.

The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! ... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.

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[-] reksas@sopuli.xyz 48 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

i would rather have video go black for the duration of ad than watch that filth

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[-] foggy@lemmy.world 48 points 5 months ago

I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.

It'll only affect me when I need to fix something I'm unfamiliar with, and it'llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.

I don't know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it'll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

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[-] Gamers_Mate@kbin.run 44 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.

[-] computerscientistII@lemm.ee 116 points 6 months ago

No, it could not have been avoided. I don't watch ads. Ads don't need to be "scam ads" for me to not watch them. I just don't. Full stop.

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[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 36 points 5 months ago

I already barely watch YouTube. It's mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.

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[-] Microplasticbrain@lemm.ee 32 points 5 months ago

Over the past years I've been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I'll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don't even remember most of the channels I used to watch.

They're just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.

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[-] andrewth09@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.

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[-] catch22@programming.dev 31 points 5 months ago

People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.

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[-] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 points 5 months ago

Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people's voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There's a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I'm sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.

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[-] iquanyin@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago

then i won’t be using it much, if at all.

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[-] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 5 months ago

this is all bullshit btw, it won't do anything for thirdparty clients and yt-dlp for example.

This is because blocking is entirely client side now, with no way of youtube determining whether or not its happened at all.

[-] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 34 points 5 months ago

They’re testing to embed the ads in the stream and not the usual switch to a different video

It definitely affects third party client if now they get a file of a video that now has 30 seconds of ad content at the beginning

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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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