- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
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I will say, I don’t know what they’ve done but it’s been fucking up my casual circumvention nicely. Now I just get forced into almost 10 minutes of ads every time, and the ad bars shows up underneath videos, the end cards at the wrong time…
Now here’s a thought - what if the real workaround Google are using here is targeting only non manifest V3 users?
That would reduce the cost of doing this, since chrome users are already forced to swallow ads and could just be served as normal.
Firefox also implements manifest v3, just without the user-hostile restrictions.
Good to know.
And I’m testing no longer using YouTube.
Cable was gone years ago, followed by all streaming. Soon all I’ll have left are games and hobbies.
EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are all on my do not buy list. Their games aren’t even worth pirating.
EA has been on the boycott list since mass effect 3
Can’t inject shitty ads in my mountain of board games.
I dunno… Hasbro kind of has a monopoly.
It seems that Youtube’s IT department has decided to utilize the budget and show investors that they are not getting paid for nothing. After all, Youtube is only testing a new type of advertising, and there are already a dozen solutions to the problem in the comments.
This wouldn’t be a problem IF content creators were paid a fair share. I wouldn’t actually mind ads nearly as much knowing that the channels I enjoy watching were getting paid reasonably for every ad that I watched. Google has the technology to make it possible.
Also if the ads were actually curated and we didn’t have crypto scams running amok
In theory this could be beaten by using a link to a timestamp at 1 second in. If it starts at 0, it’s an ad.
That would work for ads before the content, but not if they are spliced into the running video.
How likely we can defeat it with something similar to YT’s own ContentID system? We download a tons of ads, process it with feature extraction, and match it on the fly to carve out those ads. A similar system to SB can be used to let people mark where the ads is, process, and share.
Ads should be properly labeled in most market, so it should be trivial to detect what segment is ad and what isn’t. The real question is, what to do, and if the server refuses to serve the remainder of the video before the ads duration, what will it be replaced with.
I doubt if they will refuse to serve as the stream still need to buffer. That’s the fundemental of streaming.
Or I missed something?
Streaming allow caching a bit ahead, yes. But the “a bit ahead” part does not mean you can get everything; a server could very well decide to not send more than a few seconds of buffer compared to the realtime play. So, if you’re at 00:00:20 in your video and an 30 second ad is present in the video stream, the server could decide to not send anything beyond the 00:00:55 tag until 30 seconds have elapsed, for example.
It would be very annoying to code server side, and very annoying for people with spotty internet, but it’s very doable.
Just catch everything in the background, play the full ad on mute, and when the ad segment is coming up in the stream you are actually watching, switch to the cached copy. Shouldn’t be too hard to program.
How about replacing them with something nicer, like just showing “Take a moment to pause…” screen with audio muted/relaxing music background?
Sure, I’d take that over ads anytime.
I honestly wondered why they haven’t done this yet for years
It’s costly; either you prepare encodes ahead of time with different ads and serve that appropriately, or you splice ads live for each request, which is also costly in resources. You can’t get away with just a few variation; ads are usually targeted. It also come with other issues, like, it is mandatory in a lot of place to clearly identify ads, so there should be an obvious marker somewhere. If it’s in the UI, it can be detected and replaced live by a video of kittens for the duration of the ad, so I suppose they also have to handle any signal in the video… (It’s speculation, I didn’t get any of these yet).
I’m curious to see if this will hold, and how we will run around it in the long run.
Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.
YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it:
ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.
So much effort, dev time and resources just to fight users to make the experience worse and push them to alternatives to squeeze out the tiniest margin of extra ad money. Plus I’m sure this’ll be countered almost immediately. I’d be shocked if ad blockers took more than a few days to find a way to detect and neuter these ads.
This is some accelerated enshittification.
It’s quite likely that the cost actually outweighs the gains. Adblocking really isn’t all that prevalent across Internet users as a whole. I think the stats are something like 10% or lower.
But it’s always been their server. It’s not like Geico provided that video snippet
Yes, but server-side injection, if I understand it correctly, means you have to actually remux the videos into a single stream. That’s additional processing load, which is basically their main cost of business.
And yet Google is investing all this time and money into trying to block the blockers. It’s really quite stupid.
Well, most of their efforts have been relatively low cost on their end. Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do. Just requires you to have near total capture of the web browser market.
Stuff like manifest v3 isn’t actually particularly expensive to do.
Oh yes, a complete overhaul of the way their browser engine works is absolute child’s play and doesn’t cost a thing. 🙄😒
Time to switch to odysee fully I guess
I don’t know why you’d go with a crypto scheme if what you actually need is video.
Peertube is federated just like lemmy, so it doesn’t have to cook the planet to achieve decentralisation.
I’ve heard that some versions of the Blockchain are not based on computing power and therefore are not nearly as awful re: emissions. But I don’t really know much about it so I decided to look into Odysee.
Instead I found out all about how the company that created the protocol was blasted out of existence by the SEC for selling unregistered securities & the website is full of Nazis because they don’t do anything about fucking Nazis.
Never did reach a conclusion about the blockchain thing. Kinda stopped caring. Sounds like a clusterfuck.
Proof of stake is what it’s called, but then it’s even more of a ponzi scheme because you have to buy in. Like they’re literally recreating coconut island.
Also nobody seems to actually be doing it, possibly for exactly that reason. It’s just a green-washing promise of an idea.
Federation and crypto are two completely opposite philosophies of decentralisation.
Crypto is based on zero-trust, which sounds cool and edgy if you’re 15, but in practice it turns out that the people drawn to a zero trust system are untrustworthy. It’s not surprising that it’s full of Nazis.
Federation is designed around trust, which is the way our meatspace social networks actually work, and I think it’s the only reasonable way forward.
Fair enough. I completely forgot about peertube. Been using newpipe predominantly and odysee was the first alternative that came to mind.
Thanks for reminding me about peer tube. A client recommendation would be great. I’ve used p2play.
community driven skippable timestamps and remove click bait thumbnails.
Cool, but that doesn’t work when ads are inserted randomly
I can imagine a plugin system that gets submissions of hashes of specific frames - or just entire frames - when users play them, then checks those frames to detect which parts of the video are unique vs common, then automatically requests new frames to narrow down the timestamps and carve out the additions.
Probably wouldn’t take more than a handful of views across the entire network to get a pretty solid ad removal system. Even better it wouldn’t even rely on user input, which itself is already pretty fast. I have never encountered even the newest video that wasn’t already in the sponsorblock system.
Honestly this sounds like a fun project, I imagine it wouldn’t take the heroes that develop things like sponsorblock very long to figure it out. Plus they have spite on their side.
Edit: actually, rather than rely on randomised frame checks to find the collisions, have the clients submit frames then send frames out and ask clients to see if those frames appear in their videos. Then you very quickly determine which frames are unique.
New ad-free meta: DVR
YouTivo
Why should I pay or watch ads to listen to someone tell me I need to • like and subscribe • who’s sponsoring them • a life story
… before getting to the small percentage of possible useful information therein?
I’ve taken to using Ai to summarize video content just to be able to review if the video even contains an answer or information which is relevant.
I know I’m just one use case, that I don’t watch a ton of other content. It’s usually how to do something or fix something or configuration of something. I’ve sat through countless ads and videos which just wasted my time and left me frustrated trying to find information.
Panning for gold through endless kaka.
I’ve taken to using Ai to summarize video content just to be able to review if the video even contains an answer or information which is relevant.
That sounds interesting. Could you tell me how? Using OpenAI api to summarize transcripts or something?
I’ll probably get hammered for this, but then again, you’ll have to pay for API access anyway. I’ve been testing out notegpt.io (not affiliated). Exactly because of my reasons listed, and because I often have to research or do trainings, I needed ways to save time and ‘sift’ through lots of information. I used to just play videos in say 1.5 speed, but even then it’s sometimes hard to stay focused or you might miss something and have to stop and go back. Sometimes language is a barrier too. Not to mention the ads. So for my own sanity, I’ve been testing that out. It’s been pretty damn good actually. I can get by on the lowest tier and you can try it free too. Again it’s not for everyone, but I’d rather give them money than Google for their Anti-customer behavior.
Hey Googoo, I ain’t gonna watch YouTube if it got ads
(I think that’s their goal, either ads or no watch)
Shhh. It is a huge “fuck you” to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.
They don’t want you if you’re not watching ads or paying money. They don’t want to give you bandwidth for free.
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching. Except on extremely rare occasions. I don’t need it badly enough to deal with that.
Same.
I’m excited for YouTube to end my YouTube addiction lol.
Please, Google. Do it. Dare ya.
I genuinely spend too much time on that site, but I haven’t seen an ad in years. If that changes, then I guess I’ll have to change, too.
I went to watch a diy video at work with chrome and was like WTF is this shit, the ads were so bad I walked back across the shop to get my phone and pull up the same video and started watching it before the video even started on the computer. Who in the hell can actually watch shit like that? It’s insane.
As we learned from the reddit app changes, the ending of Netflix account sharing, etc etc the people who will take this action are few enough not to matter. Regretfully.
Here is the thing though. Those of us that are willing to try advanced projects and talk about them, we’re the real influencers.
YT has chosen to pander to the children and adolescent of mind, likely because those in charge are of a similar depth. The platform will be like cable television eventually; totally irrelevant.
I’d like to believe that to be true
That doesn’t matter to me. When a company does shit like this, I won’t use it and will actively avoid it. People can do what they want and if they want to be abused constantly that’s on them. I don’t really care. I make my choice and I stick with it. Change will never happen with companies, they don’t care unless they actually get charged more then the money they make from their abuse and we all know that will never happen .
People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.
It’s Idiocracy
Bruh, in Idiocracy, they at least wanted to do the right thing, even if they were too dumb to do so.
How sad is it that Idiocracy overestimated people?
Each of these exoduses moves the bar a little bit. We only lose if we give up. Eventually the bad decisions will catch up to them, as long as we keep pushing.
I don’t know about you, but what I learned is we’ll build our own Youtube with blackjack and hookers.
It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren’t as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.
We’re about to have a great big shattering of the internet and I’m all for it. Collating the pieces will be a pain in the ass for a couple years but some handful of nerds out there blessed by the spirit of Ritchie will create a tool for it, and what’s left of our world will be a better place for it.
I’ve been just recommending Lemmy out there as the new internet, which us what this feels like to me, IS like the old internet again!
This one’s on my bingo card.
Question, if a square on your bingo card is titled, “collapse of society,” can I still use it for this?
Well I don’t know about the Reddit stuff not mattering—I occasionally still check on it for a couple of niche communities and the Reddit I used to enjoy has basically died, it’s like the place is filled with angry idiots now. Those people were always there before but usually buried under a load of downvotes where you could mostly ignore them; they now seem to be a majority of those left contributing over there.
They killed the golden goose in scaring off enough of the people contributing most interesting posts and comments (who were doing it entirely for free!) that the lunatics have taken over and shat on everything
Everyone I’ve spoken to about it has noted that it’s become a very different place. I’ll still use it for reviews and getting tips for serious things like privacy and some basic DIY. But a lot of that advice will be obsolete in a couple years and very few people are replenishing it. Who’s going to give a shit about the best home theater setups of 2023 in two years?
Hope folks will actually stick to claims such as this when the time comes
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching.
…
Except on extremely rare occasions.
I’m sorry, I just find it funny that you walked back the “I’m done with Youtube” claim in the very next sentence.
Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.
I don’t think it can be completely avoided, but it can definitely be trimmed down a hell of a lot. As an example, if you watch YouTube for an hour a day and they make a change like this and you start watching it for 10 minutes a week, that’s a serious reduction.
Ngl, I’m torn on this because I’m honestly not sure I could stop using YouTube.
I hate ads with a burning passion, though, so we’ll see which wolf wins out there.
If i can’t get around this using something like SponsorBlock, I feel like I’ll probably just set up some kind of pipeline to download videos and remove the ads myself (maybe using AI if it’s that bad) and just serve them over Jellyfin or something. Gonna be a pain, though.
I wouldn’t particularly like it, that’s for sure. But I would ultimately just bite the bullet and do it. At some point, you’re just pushed too far and it’s just not worth dealing with.
With the state of AI and computer vision, and legal requirements to disclose ads, i wonder if a ytdl + editing script will he the nicest way to watch at some point
I have a ytdl script download my “subscriptions” automatically to my jellyfin media server and an invidious server for everything else.
Its already is a much nicer way to watch content right now.
