some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
What would be terrifying about it?
‘oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary’
That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
Good to know. I’d rather pay for a vpn than YouTube premium.
Humanity accepts your challenge! See y’all on the battlefield ;-)
lights molotov cocktail
…
“are we not going to do that, or…? asking for a friend, of course”
We can do it the old fashioned way
You can solve any problem with a Molotov cocktail. Any time I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom, right away, I had a different problem!
Where is that image from?
A show called ‘The Good Place’. Good show imo.
Ah ok cool, thanks I watched I think the first season. Need to finish it.
But we fixed this already, it was called TiVo…
This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.
There’s already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won’t even take that long.
That’s “crowdsourced”, i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.
Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
Why not use that screen time to promote alternative to YouTube?. Or even a simple Fuck google screen : " insert why google sucks here".
Because that would just be another ad lol
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people’s voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There’s a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I’m sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.It’s hard to run AI on phones and low-end hardware though. It’s not that easy.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don’t see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
then i won’t be using it much, if at all.
fuck google.
Right? I already don’t use youtube as much as possible. Piped helps, but if that stops working, I just won’t watch movies on youtube.
I understand why people are upset anytime a company fucks their customers for money, but the solution is always to walk away.
this is all bullshit btw, it won’t do anything for thirdparty clients and yt-dlp for example.
This is because blocking is entirely client side now, with no way of youtube determining whether or not its happened at all.
They’re testing to embed the ads in the stream and not the usual switch to a different video
It definitely affects third party client if now they get a file of a video that now has 30 seconds of ad content at the beginning
it won’t though, because you can just remove that 30 seconds at the beginning, which is almost definitely going to be very different than the rest of the video in a number of ways. Notably, there are likely going to be UI differences during and after ads play, as well as video playback alterations. Ad’s aren’t going to be the same quality as video itself.
It’s possible that they’re transcoding them into the video itself, but doing that would be catastrophically bad and have such a massive cost that it simply would not be worthwhile.
They are transcoding them into the video. Sponsorblock had to make a quick change to discard submissions from users that have been identified to be on this trial system, because it affects the video length, and as such - makes it impossible to have consistent segments
i highly doubt it. I would think they’re probably doing some UDP packet voodoo bullshit.
Though it likely appears as transcoded.
The sheer cost of them being transcoded into videos is immense, even if they’re live encoding every video.
What happens when you get an ad you need to takedown and remove? You’re on disk transcode is suddenly useless now, and you need to make a new one, easy enough, you can just do that in the background, but this also means your ads are baked into each video, which is less than ideal, unless you’re constantly updating them.
And if you’re doing live transcodes, that means that you have to do this for every view on every video, and i’m not sure that’s sustainable.
I suppose you could probably do a cached live transcode system to bring down the overhead, but i can’t imagine it’s easier than just pulling some voodoo networking bullshit to literally inject an advertisement.
AFAIK there is no need to re-encode, since Youtube videos are stored and served in chunks anyways. The change is that they are now slipping in the ad chunks as if they were a part of the normal video chunk stream.
yeah that’s what im saying. Re-encoding and transcoding is completely different, it’s more than likely a served change, rather than a stored change.
Nothing to do with UDP
shocker
We can just train an AI to filter out the spam , just like we did with email.
We’ll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.
I think it is time to bring back The Wadsworth Constant!
When I have to wade through sixteen different “Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!” pop-ups every time I whisper the words “online video” in the direction of my phone, I’m rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.
My TV doesn’t pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I’m a civilized human being. I don’t get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!! GIVE ME
$8$12$15$20!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.The demise of Youtube begins
there is a plugin I bought, it’s community driven where you can tag sections of the video as ad, sponsored, etc, and auto skip it. it’s really nice, was like $5. will post when I find the link, but even if ads are server side, this plugin will skip. someone has to bite the bullet though and tag time stamps unfortunately.
found it, called dearrow, also changed clikcbait thumbnails and titles are editable by community.
