this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.