The best adblocker is to stop using youtube 🤣
Won’t happen. People are too addicted at watching"creators" talking shits.
The miracle of creation
I wanted to jump into using Peertube, but unfortunately Youtube grew enormous because it was the only thing at the time. Pulling people from it to other platforms with less viewers and usually no compensation is tough. (although YT compensation as of late is a joke as well)
Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.
YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷♂️
Just matter of time
Why would that be the case? The player can simply be locked into ad mode till it gets the cue from the server all of the ads have been streamed. Only then will the player unlock. When watching what amounts to a video stream, this doesn’t have to be handled clientside.
Well the player and its controls are client side.
and making them server site, while possible would introduce tremendous amounts of lag, and put that much more load on the servers. Imagine a server that has to handle playback of billions of users all at once. That’s probably quite a bit worse than most average, or even high-level DDoS attacks.
I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.
This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.
Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads, that’s always been the case.
Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.
I just read your list and it confirms mine.
Small buffer AND can’t skip ahead on a boring video because you can only get served the ads to unlock further video after time equal to the served video duration has passed.
That is not YouTube, it’s online TV and there will be an impact on the product. Preloading a video via a 3rd party client will still easily beat this scheme. Just get a headstart equal to the first ad break.
So you would need buffer barrieres essentially.
Still user watches video. Ad avoidance skips forward to buffer barrier to play ad in the background. Streamed ad is thrown away and new buffer data is received. User does not notice if the video is long enough.
In this case the buffer limit is the metadata.
Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:
A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.
One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.
The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.
My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.
Sure if you fundamentally change what YouTube you can make it work.
You need very small buffers or complete disablement of seeking even outside of ads. Otherwise a client can reconstruct the video without viewer interruption.
People however expect to be able to skip ahead in YouTube videos, otherwise its just TV.
So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?
Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.
Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.
The sad thing is they inject ads to your feed even if you have premium. I keep seeing product videos in my feed named “Meet the x product”. Youtube and google is just shameless and I’m pretty sure they’re breaking a bunch of laws.
So YouTube Premium is as worthless as I thought. Google was never great in drawing recognizable lines between their free offering and paid… and it seems their solution is to make everything as shitty as possible and barely fix the stuff they fucked up.
Let’s wait until Google Maps gets ads … routing already seems fishy to me.
Thanks for your brief description… only shows me that my next Phone won’t be a Pixel.
Definitely avoid Pixels. They look better than most Android devices in terms of software imo, although it’s because they’re really locking down the firmware similar to iOS, which breaks the purpose of using Android anyway. Also the processor on the Pixels are even behind 5-6 year old phones.
Btw…Google Maps has ads already, the square icons are all ads paid by the place owners. Routing is fishy yes, because they’re actively routing people through different routes in order to collect data for their algorithms.
The biggest reason I still use Google products is there is no alternative and they fully know this.
I got a Pixel 6 because I wanted to try something new … it will probably be my last Pixel.
If there is a phone out there with Lineage/Cyanogen (or whatever it’s called now) out of the box with decent HW, I would prefer that.
The last 2 years changed Google. They feel hollow like a blimp. Looking big but no real oomph any more.
MythTV solved this long ago. We already have the tech to bypass this shit.
Could you supply a source for this?
Go download MythTV yourself. Shit’s been available for decades. I used to use it with a capture card to timeshift/DVR cable television. The source is me. I used it. It was great. It auto-removed TV ads when it recorded your shows.
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Removing_Commercials#Automatically_removing_commercials
The arms race continues.
now I need to move away from Telegram & YouTube at the same time… oef
I just want the Temu ads to stop
Most of the ads we see on our Roku Tv are political. I don’t know about Temu’s but I’d rather get non-political ads.
Oh well.
YouTube can be past-tense. There’s a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.
Agreed, it’s just hard to find a suitable replacement for many things like tvs, since there’s a lack of alternative apps for other platforms on things like roku or LG tvs
The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it’s a very old approach for adding ads to video streams.
I just hope they don’t start running commercials during the streams like quarter and half screen commercials over top the existing content. A lot of TV channels started doing that when DVRs first popped up.
I suspect that this will be a thing eventually… It’s a reasonably easy way to defeat apps/systems like Comskip that detect and remove ads from videos. Comskip is what Plex, Jellyfin, etc. use to detect ads in DVR recordings.
Those ad removal systems usually find ads by looking for changes in the video. For example, sometimes there’s black frames before and after the ads, sometimes there’s a TV station logo that goes away during ads (especially on channels like CNN), sometimes there’s a change in volume, etc. If they make the ads look similar enough to actual content, it becomes very difficult to automatically remove them. Online platforms like YouTube are trying to achieve the same thing - Make ads “look like” non-ads to make them harder to block.
Comskip has a pretty wide array of detection. They also look at percent scene change,volume , closed captioning, aspect ratios and duration patterns. The sweet part about the duration patterns is we know the contents supposed length. You could analyze the piece of media figure out how long it would be without it and look around for other options that are less obvious but make the right time code.
I’ve been using comskip for years, I suspect if it ends up being the tool we need will have an arsenal of people working on it to tune it for whatever YouTube’s doing.
They’re just looking to knock out the easy methods, they’re not going to try to wage a full-on ground war. Their primary goals are probably to stop ublock and brave, and keep YT-DLP from downloading without ads. secondary goals being to stop or slow down revanced, though I think Google’s going to try to do that for them in security.
I think the next logical step if they can’t block us with reasonable means would be to do some custom encryption in the app. Again not insurmountable but hard to crack out right.
I think using a server to download the whole steam with ads then remove the ads, compress and store the files is really the hardest thing for them to stop.
I’m surprised it took them so incredibly long to crack down on adblockers.
They used to still be only a small percentage until the entire internet got completely decimated by ads in the past 5 years.
Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.
As a YT Premium subscriber I really don’t mind the sponsor sections. Money goes to the creator and a few taps and I’m back to watching. Also, I think outright banning sponsor segments is going to make creators more creative in a bad way…
I totally understand your views, although I’m paying this platform to not show me ads, that money should then go to the creators if they have to insert ads into their videos for some change. This is the platform’s fault.
I mean, it’s very easy money given you already have a channel and a name dor youself. What would YT have to pay creators to not care about such easy money?
i would consider paying for premium if they broke out the payments properly, i don’t fucking want youtube tv youtube music or whatever other bullshit is attached, just fucking get rid of the ads and charge me like 5 bucks a month and i’ll fuck off.
deleted by creator
Let’s make an actual useful AI that detects ads and muted/blacks out the screen during ads. Haha
Comskip, it’s not AI, and it works fine.
The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.
Processing isn’t the expensive part. It’s bandwidth. Transferring that much data gets expensive.
Storage more likely. Google owns fiber backbones and peers against the tier 1 providers directly. The over all point of ‘no, it’s still prohibitively expensive’ stands unless you’ve got 20B of dark fiber in your pocket.
Bit of A, bit of B?
Right, that’s probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they’re talking about how they’re limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.
Some napkin math:
Youtube has ~7M average concurrent viewers.
https://streamscharts.com/overview?platform=youtube
A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.
Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.
https://www.netnod.se/ix/netnod-ix-pricing
For comparison, Mastodon’s monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.
Super rough calculations, but there’s probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube’s viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.
It’s notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.
But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.
Yes, that’s also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.
Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.
Was my sarcasm not thick enough?
My point was that PeerTube works just fine because BitTorrent is viable.
I caught it, down voters suck at reading lol
And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn’t paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I’ll miss them.
What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?
I’m getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.
MBAs on their way to destroy their company’s relationship with their customers and cause a socioeconomic disaster (their numbers will grow by 0.01% 💪💪)
If you don’t pay for something, you are not a customer, you are the product. If you pay for Youtube, you don’t see the ads, but you are also still their product. Lose /Lose
Okay, but if you sell cows, and all your cows escape or die, your business is still ruined
The network effect is too strong. The minority that are whining here isn’t going to make a dent. Next time you’re out, look at how many people are using ads ridden apps instead of paying $0.99 or whatever to remove them. The users have already decided their time and privacy is worthless and would rather getting the service for “free”.
Reddit is still going strong I feel.
Hey don’t blame us, blame the nepos who got on the board without even needing to study for it!
My MBA track actively rewards me for thinking like a socialist XD.
As in my profits, our losses?
Line go up 💹
I’m really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use
It’s only a matter if time til they enshittificate gmail as well.
