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helpImTrappedOnline ,

Maybe if they cleared out the scams and served more than 3 ads on repete, I wouldn’t feel the need to block them. Yes, no one likes ads, but I get its to pay for the content I’m watching for free.

blady_blah , (edited )

I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.

glitchdx ,

I used to pay for youtube premium. My logic being that I was using an adblocker anyway, and I wanted the content creators I watched to get some kind of revenue for my watchtime. Youtube stopped taking my money a while back, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. These days, there’s so little content that I find interesting that I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching videos. It’s only a matter of time until I just stop regularly going to youtube.

djsaskdja ,

I paid for it until they basically doubled the price.

Etterra ,

There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.

elliot_crane ,

IIRC the developer of SponsorBlock was asked about this and seemed very unconcerned.

magic_lobster_party ,

I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.

A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.

aStonedSanta ,

Yeah they just need to range the ad from x->y time into video playback starts.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren’t inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.

It’s a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, them automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.

It’s slightly harder to do, but not impossible.

Unbecredible ,

Unfortunately I think there’s been a good bit of evidence recently that people WILL accept it. As a prime example lemmy hasn’t exactly replaced reddit despite the relative uproar that the API changes caused. Netflix & co just keep hiking prices and people just keep buying it.

And then on the technical side, if the ads are coming from the server it’s possible youtube might just refuse to serve the rest of the video stream until all or most the ad’s runtime has passed. It depends on how serious they want to get about capturing the revenue lost to adblock users.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Sure, but then that’s an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.

The mandatory add wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.

And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.

The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don’t die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself “The homepage of the internet.” The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.

Reddit is still dying however. There’s been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they’re harder to access, now they’re doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won’t last forever as a culturally relevant site.

KillingTimeItself ,

if you’re downloading the video locally it would be incredibly trivial to remove the segment of the ad. There are various different mechanisms i can think of that would work.

obviously, beginning and end ads are super trivial.

Ideally, youtube won’t be natively encoding the ads into the videos, because that would be a nightmare, so presumably they’re doing injection instead, that would be pretty obvious from the get go.

If not, they have to have some kind of interface for the advertisement you could very easily use that to track the ad placement itself, though that might be problematic.

There are likely other clever things that can be done, we’ll have to see what happens.

InternetUser2012 ,

There’s already a filter for UBO that blocks it. That was much quicker than I expected. Works and is further down this thread.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

I remember using MythTV in the beforetimes, and you’d record the show off the cable tuner, then it would process the file and remove the commercials based on volume levels and light signatures. It was remarkably good at it and was how I watched all TV until streaming came around.

I would imagine someone could do the same even better today with an AI model that would recognize all the ads and deliver an edited stream. The problem is that the video would have to be downloaded beforehand and then the streams stored elsewhere and referenced by an addon that redirects you.

UnfortunateShort ,

Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).

aStonedSanta ,

Oh. I like this. Sponsor block but network wide basically xD

SteveTech ,

For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.

I have no idea how to do this from JS though.

Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.

p5yk0t1km1r4ge ,
@p5yk0t1km1r4ge@lemmy.world avatar

I’m so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit

InternetUser2012 ,

I’ll just download the video and skip the shit, idgaf, I’m not watching ads, google can suck it.

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