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Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

InternetUser2012 ,

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

p5yk0t1km1r4ge ,
@p5yk0t1km1r4ge@lemmy.world avatar

I’m so fucking sick of their greedy bullshit

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.

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.

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.

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.

elbucho ,
@elbucho@lemmy.world avatar

I find it fascinating how media companies evolved their usage of ads over time. Used to be that the purpose of showing someone an ad was to get them to buy your product. Now, though, the companies who make the ads are paying to have them put on media networks who use the ads to annoy you into paying for a premium membership so you don’t have to see them. It’s double dipping.

Not sure how I would feel if I made an ad, and YouTube was saying to their users: “Yeah, you like that fucking ad? Super annoying, isn’t it? If you don’t pay me more money, I’m going to cram that annoying bullshit down your throat every time you want to watch a video. I’m going to put ads at the beginning of videos. I’m going to sprinkle them throughout the middle. Hell, I’m even going to make you watch ads after the video ends! You like that, you little bitch??”

simplejack ,
@simplejack@lemmy.world avatar

It’s the evolution of the premium cable model. HBO, Showtime, etc. The upgraded cable tier has ad-free content and exclusives.

elbucho ,
@elbucho@lemmy.world avatar

Yup. I’m old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that it was ad-free. Then, of course, they started adding ads. And then they sold us premium channels that didn’t have ads. Now those have ads, too. You just can’t get away from them.

Rubisco ,

You just can’t get away from them.

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/d9be440d-416e-4ff5-9ddb-4e23855d6d3f.gif

krashmo ,

Gotta make that line go up somehow

JohnEdwa ,

It’s been seven years, and this sketch is just getting more and more fitting each day.

homesweethomeMrL ,

And that’s when I moved to Invidious and haven’t looked back

lud ,

What makes you think they won’t block them or force ads to them as well?

You do know that Invidious is still YouTube, right?

homesweethomeMrL ,

It’s an open source front end to youtube, yes. So no ads on the sidebar, no bullshit about logging in, no garbage algorithm to be harassed by.

And no commercials yet. If YT streams the ads and invidious doesn’t block them and adblocker doesn’t block them and PiHole doesn’t block them, I will not watch them.

Death to Advertisement.

lud ,

I don’t think YouTube cares if you refuses to watch their videos on another platform or not.

They probably prefer if you didn’t. You only cost them money with no revenue whatsoever.

boywar3 ,

They are still a metric they can peddle to their advertisers to show “how many people see this ad in a month.”

InternetUser2012 ,

I’ll download it so I can skip the bullshit if it comes down to it.

SaltySalamander ,

Considering I can't get Invidious to serve me a video in a higher res than 480p, no thanks.

homesweethomeMrL ,

Those ads do look good in 1080p!

ramble81 ,

This is where AI would come in handy. Start scrubbing the buffer as it’s coming in to identify the difference and jump past it.

cRazi_man ,

It becomes an AI war. They will use AI to make ads to get around the AI blocking. The ads will end up looking very similar to the content.

Ad: “Hey guys. It’s ya boy, NordVPN, here today to tell you about the dangers of using the internet without my VPN…”

cheese_greater ,

Whatever happened to ad placement lol

Kowowow ,

Then you start using ai to put in anti ads that point out all the bad stuff about the usual ad subjects, I’d say get as code to libel/slander as possible without risking a lawsuit

ApatheticCactus ,

I’d be watching a car accident compilation and a Buick starts trying to tell me to ask my doctor about Cymbalta. You know… I might actually watch that.

Azzu ,

Aren’t they legally required to indicate that an ad is playing? Should be almost trivial to detect and I don’t know how they’d get around that.

roofuskit ,

I’m the US? I think only if the content is targeted at children.

some_guy ,

Aha! So this is how one snuck into a video I downloaded last night. Fuckers. At least with a locally downloaded file I can quickly skip ahead.

elbarto777 ,

Or even trim it.

roofuskit ,

Way back in the day when I used SageTV to record live TV there were programs that would automatically identify commercials and skip them for you. Computers are way more powerful now so I doubt it will be long before there’s and app that automatically downloads your favorite YouTube channels and prescans the videos to skip the ads.

I_Miss_Daniel ,

Still using comskip.exe today although it seems to be having more trouble than it used to.

RonnyZittledong ,
@RonnyZittledong@lemmy.world avatar

This must consume a tremendous amount of processing to do since they would have to transcode copies for every ad region/campaign and every resolution on demand. I am interested in how they made this financially viable.

Nollij ,

Not necessarily. They could split the video in advance, assuming the ads will always be at the same point. Even if not, they could still use the direct, unaltered source with a range. The big challenge would be keeping it all synced, which I think is safe to say that they will get right.

But even if it did need to be transcoded, YouTube automatically transcodes every single video uploaded, multiple times. They are clearly not afraid of it.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

If you’ve ever used yt-dl, you’ll know that YT vids are all split into multiple files. Presumably, this is where the ads get injected.

SaltySalamander ,

No, they're not split. Each one of those results you get from yt-dlp is a different version of the same video. I.e. different resolutions, different codecs. Some of them are the audio, some of them are the video, but they're not split.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

They are also that. But when you watch YouTube-dl download a video, it downloads several parts, then ffmpeg recombines them into a single output file.

AProfessional ,

I’d guess its a solution similar to DASH that dynamically streams different content.

roofuskit ,

Since AI has caused them to complete abandoned any illusions about their carbon zero footprint I think they just stopped caring.

Ilovethebomb ,

If they only do it for very popular videos, the additional cost will be trivial.

magic_lobster_party ,

They don’t need to do any extra transcoding. It’s not that costly to stitch videos together. If done at specific strategic locations, it’s like copying a text file into another.

Bishma , (edited )
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

~~My local invidious instance is borked too. Not sure if its related and I don’t have time to investigate now. ~~ Guess I need something else for background noise.

Edit: Took enough time to get a fresh image and its working again. Looks like I hadn’t updated since September.

dinckelman ,

I know there’s a significant part of the market that’d just say yeah, fuck it, i’ll pay for Redtube Youtube Red Youtube Premium, but there’s also a significant part of it, where a lot of people would rather just stop watching stuff entirely.

It’s just like Hulu back in the days. You’d have no choice but to pay for a premium tier, just to have 14 unskippable ads forced down your throat, all in a span of a 19 minute long tv episode. I stopped paying after that month and resorted to piracy.

Piracy is always a service issue, except now it’s legitimately going to harm individual creators, who have just about everything to lose, rathen that a rotten husk of some corporation, that’s going to print free money, no matter what you do

baggins ,

I’d 100% pay for it if the pricing made any sense.

dinckelman ,

The price is absolutely obscene. No fucking way i’m paying that

SaltySalamander ,

When it was 9 bucks, it was worth it. Certainly isn't now.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

except now it's legitimately going to harm individual creators,

I know it isn't the world we live in anymore, and there's nothing we can do about it...but maybe we shouldn't have treated YouTube like a job and just kept it as a hobby video website between ordinary people. Like what it started out as.

dinckelman ,

To be honest, whether we want it or not, art is a necessary aspect of society. The issue here is that we put a lot of trust in a corporate environment, the entire goal of which is to pocket as much as possible, while riding the success of the people creating stuff

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Yeah that's what I mean. People created entire careers which are 100% dependent on the whims of a mega corporation. It never seemed like a stable source of income to me. I've always treated it like it's just a silly video site, nothing more.

SaltySalamander ,

Redtube is a porn site, lol.

furzegulo ,

how i wish there was a good alternative for youtube

QuadratureSurfer ,
@QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world avatar

Grayjay has been useful for that. I still follow people on YouTube, but if they setup a channel anywhere else I can switch my feed to draw from those sources instead.

some_guy ,

Support candidates who want to limit the ability for large tech companies to acquire their competitors. Maybe even those that wish to see their acquisitions rolled back. Maybe even those that wish to see them broken up.

elbarto777 ,

P-Peertube?

roofuskit ,

Not a great alternative. The second it becomes actually successful it will collapse.

elbarto777 ,

Shucks.

polonius-rex , 
www.youtube.com##+js(json-prune-fetch-response, playerAds adPlacements adSlots playerResponse.playerAds playerResponse.adPlacements playerResponse.adSlots, , propsToMatch, /player?)

Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in "My filters" pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.

from the reddit page idk if it works but most comments say it does

and if it does, that's fucking hilarious

this will have taken a team months of work and one ublock dev just threw it in the toilet within an hour

ShunkW ,

This worked for me. Thanks!

downpunxx OP ,

ok, so i added this code to my ublock origin filter list, then went to youtube, and the injected ads were still showing up in about half the vids. closed firefox, reopened, same. rebooted my win11 machine, now the injected ads are NOT showing up any longer. not sure if youtube switched it off because they're still beta testing this bullshit or if the code is working but it SEEMS to be working. if it stops i'll come back to edit this comment. thanks for the tip man!

big_slap ,

👑

kokesh ,
@kokesh@lemmy.world avatar

So in theory… can reVanced come up with something like this,

hagelslager ,

Thank you!

shotgun_crab ,

The ublock origin guys are wizards, I tell you…

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