If they put the ads in the stream, you can just fast-forward. I don’t think it’ll work out well for Google.
Oh, turns out each ad is 15 seconds long per an agreement to standardize playback.
Oh, turns out you can’t skip the first 30 seconds of a video.
Oh, turns out if the first 15 seconds doesn’t play, the playback disables entirely.
~Solutions a lowly forklift repair technician came up with in five seconds.
Imagine what a Google developer might think of.
This is something they are really good at, refining code until it does work well for Google.
There is a whole topic in wasm called server side rendered DOM.
I hardly think there is a chance to block adds when they achieve it to render all the content on their side.
I don’t like to say this, but:
AI
But unless the page ends up as just a single canvas/image you’ll still get all the HTML tags which can be stripped before your browser renders them?
There’s already SASE solutions that host a virtual browser boundary-side and present the user a painted canvas rather than the original DOM:
There are twitch adblockers, it’s just ublock origin that doesn’t work on it anymore, people did find a way.
Web devs busy at work making the internet more and more unusable each day. And they wonder why I despise them.
Ads are not always the same, not for everyone. Ads are localized in time, space and per person sometimes.
An advanced adblock would just need to download the video from two sources match the videos and eliminate the differences as those differences will surely be ads.
Newpipe ftw.
Sadly, it’s only for Android.
The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes its primary use, music, pointless to me.
Another issue is Pandora, they keep forcing mobile site on Desktop User Agent setting and I work too many hours to go in and change the identifiers needed to make it work. Their app is busted as well, it asks for permissions and will semi-frequently crash when I dont give them permissions.
The whole internets basically becoming shit because of corporate incompetence. Not even willful malice, just idiocy.
Fun little piece of trivia: the primary use of YouTube is not, in fact, music.
Fun little piece of trivia: my primary use of YouTube was, in fact, music, you illiterate nimrod.
Fun little piece of trivia: Originally, nimrod used to mean “skillful hunter” (after Nimrod, the biblical figure) but then in 1940 Bugs Bunny sarcastically called Elmer Fudd a “poor little nimrod", and kids of the time not knowing the reference, simply assumed it was an insult on Elmer’s character.
And that’s how a cartoon rabbit single handedly changed the meaning of a word.
That’s what’s up, Doc.
Clearly. That’s still in no way the primary intended use of YouTube because, you know, video?
You over redundant lossless head!
Lets read my statement back, abridged
its primary use … to me.
Is this like a sentence structure that doesnt exist in other languages or were a nonnegligible number of lemmings homeschooled?
The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes its primary use, music, pointless to me.
This, my humorous fellow netizen, means:
Something AND something make the primary use (of said thing, YouTube), music (the specification of what is the primary use), pointless to me (such that I did not find said primary use any longer possible).
We know what you mean because we are charitable enought not to assume you think the primary use of youtube is music, but you fucked the wording up and I made fun of you for that.
What you wanted to say should have been phrased as it follows:
The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes my primary use, listening to music, impossible.
Now if public school in your country were better funded, you’d understand that my poking fun of you also had a different implication: it’s not that unreasonable for YouTube to have people suck huge bandwith to stream videos just for the minimal amount of sound data attached.
I mean, it’s obvious what you meant, but that’s still awful grammar on your part.
When read properly, your wording means that you are stating that YouTubes’ primary use is music, which is useless to you.
Getting to your actual meaning requires interpreting around the literal meaning of what you wrote.
I don’t know this for sure, but I feel like this is something you can do with freetube. Regardless, it’s worth looking into.
I don’t like using apps to start with tbh, 100% pass on that. Installing random software to phones should never have become so commonplace.
I agree. We have mobile web sites for just about everything. Apps should really only be for when the requirements are too complex for a website. Webapps are probably convenient alternative for most apps.
Hell, I can do my banking on the mobile site, so why do I need to install an app and share my phone’s contacts and precise location? Why does it need to access my phone’s storage and sensors and ability to make calls?
I use an app for local banking because the encryption is a little better and there is potential for browser addons to view the page data, but TBH I wouldn’t trust a Wells Fargo or US Bank app lol.
I run GrapheneOS, so I can more explicitly set permissions and scopes, but the app won’t run without all the permissions enabled, so I won’t use it.
The only thing the app can do that the website can’t is deposit checks with a picture, and considering how rarely I use checks, it’s not something I need an app for.
That’s because they want you to pay a subscription fee for YouTube music.
For the Pandora app, they don’t want you using it if you don’t give them permission to do whatever it is they want to do.
It is malicious. It’s often incompetence too, but it’s also malicious.
Even if they benefit from me using YT Music, they make no sales pitch at any point leading up to me seeing the button is gone and leaving the platform. They are just missing out on tons of ad revenue from users that otherwise would have stayed and listened for hours.
And Pandora also assuredly did not design their app to crash.
It’s so weird that YouTube is their second most profitable venture after adsense. It’s like they thought, we have a virtual monopoly on internet ads, Internet video, and web browsers. Let’s combine their power to make people watch non stop ads while tracking them worse than the CIA. Then, let’s be very surprised when people don’t like us and we get hit with antitrust lawsuits. Fuck Google.
Google went from don’t be evil to fuck you all.
To put it shortly: “Went public”.
They have been evil for far longer than that
Then, let’s be very surprised
They’re not the least bit surprised. They did the math. The profit is more than the penalty.
And all they would need to do is offer a YouTube ad free plan that’s at a sensible price without any of the YouTube music crap included.
But no… They keep trying to shove the YouTube Premium bundle down our throats and no one wants it. We just want ad free.
Is mom stabbing herself?
That’s something like a cleaver, so it’s got a blunt tip that looks like it’s going through her blouse.
I really hate that picture. Imagine swapping the man and tho woman. He and their two kids waiting, knifes ready, for the spouse to come back from work, ready for stabbing an unsuspect. Wow, what an outcry this would have.
You really think there’d be an outcry? Rather than it just not being a popular meme format?
bro it’s a meme so whatever
cry about it
murder is hot
not pictured: the pihole just out of frame, holding a shotgun
??? Pihole never blocked YouTube ads.
It blocked YouTube ads when ads where served from other domains or subdomains. Now that they’re served from the same subdomains as videos, it’s not blocking anymore.
Google bought YouTube before there were ads. The ads were always Google’s own ads from their own domains so Pihole could never block them.
How do you use Pihole to block YouTube ads?
You can’t. I have no idea what this person is talking about.
Block youtube.com. Quite effective, if you ask me.
all these people missing the part where I said “holding a shotgun” – I guarantee you’ll never see a YouTube ad again if no data from their servers ever gets past your router. It’s not a subtle or precise option, but it is highly effective. Much like a shotgun.
Then you can just use peertube or invidious.
Invidious is currently out of order. Not sure if they would be able to cut out the ads.
never underestimate the tenacity and ingenuity of spiteful pirates. It’s been a while since I last used invidious, but I can’t imagine it being permanently broken. in the meantime – Piped, then?
If things get real stupid, we might have to employ AI to identify and strip ads from videos before mirroring. edit: Someone has, in fact, already trained an AI to identify ads in a video, with apparently 97.4% accuracy. So, the hard part’s already been done.
Piped wasn’t working earlier.
There has been some back and forth between Goolag’s countermeasures and Invidious’ countermeasures before arriving at the current situation, Invidious seemingly having lost the battle.
From their git issue tracker:
Hello,
Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.
Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore. (Some datacenter IPs may still work, but that’s a matter of time until they don’t anymore.) … This is not the death of this project. We will still try to find new solutions, but this might take time, months probably.
You can still self-host Invidious. I’m doing this for 1-2 weeks without any problems. What does not work: Public instances hosted in data centers, because YouTube blocked lots of cloud IPs.
Your comment was misleading though, as you can see from the replies.
explain the part where I misled anyone? Do you still get YouTube ads even after blocking YouTube’s servers? I’d be interested to see that, if so. Otherwise, I forgive your stupidity.
And I forgive your rudeness. That was uncalled for.
The problem is when they start doing in stream ads, that will require something new. That said, people have been doing that with cable for a while, it’ll be real interesting to see what clever stuff comes out to detect them in stream
Audio is stupidly easy to fingerprint and identify. It would be glorious if we used the very same dumbass technology to identify ad segments as they use to robo-copyright-claim creators for including a 11 second snippet of a radio ad that’s period authentic to the historical media they’re reviewing. Just take that shit and turn it right against them.
This is something that would be a surprisingly good use case for machine learning. Fingerprint the ads by watching ahead in the stream, then skip that section.
Actually, I think older algorithmic methods will work. I think that’s how TiVo worked. The annoying part is you’ll have to wait a bit at the start of the video.
It’ll require a new mother fucking video platform. We need to just collectively let YouTube die and move on.
There’s Rumble
I fuckin hate Nazis.
Then drown them out with enough non-Nazis, that’s what youtube does
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Haven’t heard anything bad about Nebula
Except the price?
What about it? It’s directly supporting the creators
Yeah, that’s fine. It’s just that in my financial position I can’t afford that.
A fair argument. I haven’t subscribed yet either since we’re trying to save money right now. Once we can though, it seems to be a great next step over YouTube
I assume something similar to sponsor block, some algorithm to identify ad segments and some user feedback to confirm. Unless I’m mistaken as to how sponsor block works?
Sponser block works via user input
People will watch the videos, report the segments that are sponser slots, and then when people watch the video they can upvote or downvote the accuracy of the report.
In stream ads would be a hard one to tackle because YouTube would likely inject them randomly into the stream to boost engagement (readas, prevent people skipping them easily).
if they were randomly placed, then couldnt you have a sponsor-block type system where instead of the ad segments being marked and skipped, information about the video is externally stored somewhere (like perhaps a really low res screenshot of the video every couple seconds, or some number generated algorithmically by a frame of video), and the results should be the same for all users for the actual video part, but if the ads are placed randomly, the ad section will suddenly not match the data other users had, prompting the video to skip until it matches again (with a buffer included if they remove the ability to move forward)
You don’t need anything so complicated.
Take two copies of the same video, diff them and only keep the parts that match.
We can also build up a database of as signatures to automatically identify them without requiring a watermark - we already have the technology to do this for detecting intro sequences for skipping.
In that case the ads are video only, no clicking on them, including to skip or anything else. So it would be detecting that trying to change where you are in the video doesn’t change anything (and exclusively playing via your 3 second buffer)
Unless I’m mistaken, none of those will block server-side ads.
I’d be satisfied with replacing the ad segment with some other video temporarily.
Your browser just receives a single video file, there’s no way to tell where in that video there’s an ad, if there even is one
You can’t remove nor replace it if you don’t know what to remove or replace
That’s the point.
Not yet
I’m not sure about the mechanism, but isn’t this the same thing as ancient early DVR’s like TiVo that would record from the cable stream and omit the ads segments?
That’s the thing, I don’t think the mechanism exists (or works) yet. I’m confident it will someday, but I didn’t think it worked yet.
You can adblock twitch, I assume it wouldn’t be too different from that
Twitch (and YouTube currently) switches to a new content stream to play an ad, which is easy to detect and block in an extension. If I understand the tech correctly, server side ads would be stitched into the playing content stream. The extension would have to know the content of the video to know that an ad is playing. There are some clever ways that might be caught (looking for spikes in bitrate, volume differences, etc), but none of that currently exists in the software in the OP.
Couldn’t I check how far along the video is?
You can click on the ad right? Detect that.
Let’s assume you can use that to determine the beginning of an ad, how do you know how much to skip?
Until the clickable part is gone.
They can block some kinds of server-side ads. And if google has those already, they have been quite successful against youtube.
But yeah, they won’t block all server-side ads.
Isn’t there some law that you have to visually indicate whether a given piece of content is sponsored (ad) or not? Can’t that just be detected by ad blockers to skip/hide ads?
I used to have a neat app on my phone that would play “Interdimensional Cable” bits, or just silence, over Spotify ads. It made it a lot more usable.
Their ad gets played, I don’t have to hear it screaming at me. Win/Win right?
There isn’t a law that I’m aware of, but typically the ad needs to be un-skippable/seek-able, which means there will always be some indication to the video player of what the user can skip or fast forward through.
That doesn’t mean Google couldn’t just make fast forwarding/seeking a premium feature, but they’d lose a lot of user appeal if they did so they probably wouldn’t do that
Even if they do this, I wouldn’t be averse to a less on demand version of youtube. 3rd party apps will let you load a number of videos for later viewing. Would probably help me consume media more responsibly and youtube has to deal with the additional resources needed to serve all the videos I didn’t wind up watching after all.
Germany has this law, sponsored segments must be clearly labelled. But one could just hash the ad anyways or just try to fast forward and if it doesn’t work and it would be the ad.
I was thinking about this. Can we crowd source add hash markers, in a similar way to how Sponsor Block opperates but with hashes instead of time stamps?
IIRC, Twitch uses similar ad injection. Ad blockers get around it by opening new video streams until they find one that isn’t running an ad. Could be wrong though, I’m parroting an uncited comment.
Even then, the only fool proof way of getting around server side ads is using an adblocking proxy that pipes the video stream into a different country. And public proxies available are not foolproof because of excessive traffic or whatnot.
And specifically this is for TTV.LOL revolving around Twitch.
I think the same applies to YouTube in the same countries Twitch can’t play ads in. But I haven’t seen anything about YouTube adblocking proxies like TTV.LOL.
Why is it that they can’t play ads in certain countries?
Until Google demanded from its vassal (Mozilla) the removal of support for extensions. Mozilla doesn’t have enough resources to do without Google
I have no idea why you’re getting down voted. It’s essentially true.
The arrangement is vital for Mozilla. According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments. https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-potential-loser-google-antitrust-search-ruling/
Unfortunately it happens more frequently than I’d like
When did this happen?
So open themselves up for more antitrust lawsuits? Telling another browser what to do.
tbh if they do server side ads I’d be glad knowing that it costs them too much that they should be glad they’re not losing money by ads, which I think they will.
This is just wrong. None of those will prevent server side ads.
Peertube is holding the folded chair ready for action
I have serious doubt’s but it seems to be the best option right now
I love how people will complain about ads on YouTube and then go on to complain that PeerTube sucks because “who’s going to pay the hosting fees?” 🙄 For the record I like PeerTube but Android clients are ass right now
That’s not my biggest complaint. The problem is it isn’t being pushed forward. It needs some serious work to even be remotely compared to YouTube.
It is getting better but I don’t think the current leadership is agrees I’ve enough. I’d like to see it move to its own legal entity with dedicated budgeting. They need to raise some serious money to get competitive. Developers are expensive but they do much better work than a few French guys.
I want the content of the original photo
