memes

I was having some problems with playback on youtube with "buffering", random skips, the video reloading, etc. It turns out that those pauses and skips were for ads that uBlock stopped. Channels with more ad placements(new videos from large channels, large companies) would stop more often. Looking at the logs for Ublock showed me that yt does track how much of the video you have watched regardless of where you started. Say I load a video and skip to the middle. It will do a callout for time watched.

I am not sure if I'm right but anyone else could correct or expand on this as I am no expert in how youtube does anything these days.

Out of order requesting of segments could be detected as well as faster requests. This would at least lead to a waiting time for the length of the ad.

What if all ads are 30seconds long, would it be impossible to lock skipping anywhere for the first 30seconds of every video?

Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don't know the numbers maybe it's still cheaper.

If there's timed annotations (like say for closed captions or chapters/sections), then there will be some sort of mechanism to line them up with the modified stream. Then compare that with a stream without ads (which might require manually removing all ads or using a premium account where ads aren't inserted) and you'll be able to estimate regions of the stream where ads have been inserted. If the timed annotations are dense, you could see where the ad begins and ends just from that.

Also if the ads themselves include timed annotations, there would be a difference in that meta data that would give it away immediately.

Or if ads are supposed to be unskippable, the metadata will need to let the client know about that. Though they could also do that on the server side and just refuse to stream anything else while it's serving an ad.

Given that, the solution might be to have a seperate program grab the steam and remove the ads for later playback. Or crowdsource that and set up torrents, though that would be exposing it to copyright implications.

I've read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven't looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.

The most likely situation is just having apps that watch the content, trim the ads off, then drop it off into a folder.

You get home, watch your downloads, put it up for the night.

Sponsorblock works with static timestamps provided by users. This would not work if the ads are inserted at randomized times.

You can still do dynamic ad serving in a stream stitched integration. It's just that the content and the ads are being served by the same CDN, hence why you can't block the ads without also blocking the content. In the manifest file there are m3u8 chucks, the file is essentially broken up into 5/10 second chunks, and when the video segment chunk is coming to an ad break, it stitches in dynamically an ad m3u8 chunk that the ad server dynamically selects based on the ads they currently have trafficked in their system.