Unless I’m mistaken, none of those will block 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?
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
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?
It would be pretty trivial for YouTube to change the hashes at random. Might require a clever caching workaround on their end but it’s totally possible to just flip a few bits before serving it.
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.
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?
European law says you need to identify paid content, it’s up to the channel to decide how, it’s usually “AD” written in a moderately contrasty color in the top right of the screen
It depends on their implementation. If they decided to somehow serve the ad itself and serve the video only after the ad is done, I think that you won’t be able to skip it, maybe only censor it to see a blank video screen or something.
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.
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.
Couldn’t I check how far along the video is?
AFAIK currently, they just add black video into the YouTube video, and play an ad separately from the main video stream. That’s what I’ve heard about people with working ad block who got this, there was just black video added to their YouTube video
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?
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.
That’s the point.
Not yet
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
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
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.
Then, let’s be very surprised
They’re not the least bit surprised. They did the math. The profit is more than the penalty.
Those fines are just the cost of doing business.
Guess we should switch to incarcerating members of the board if we want them to really feel it.
What’s funny to me is how they are in a fight for their company with the FTC, and they want to continue provoking people by increasing their revenue on the back of their users on a service they might have a technical monopoly on? Hmmmm…
Provoking people and in dispute with FTC don’t relate but if the FTC broke them up then you would really regret not cashing in while you could
Line must go up…
YouTube isn’t profitable. You want to talk antitrust in a meme about YouTube trying to make money on ads?
Suuure it’s not.
The mom should be Firefox and the kids the plugins.
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?
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 on your network 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, piped, or invidious when that gets fixed
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.
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.
Piped wasn’t working earlier.
Newpipe works on Android and Freetube works on Linux. I guess a local invidious instance works, too. But then, you’d lose pooling.
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.
You can’t. I have no idea what this person is talking about.
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.
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)
deleted by creator
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.
Not today
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
Yeah, I’ve never checked it out, but a lot of content creators I like use it. I’d like to be able to support them with a subscription instead of using YouTube and blocking all their ads. For the moment, I can’t though.
But, I do wish there were a free video platform that competed with YouTube and that wasn’t controlled by a trillion dollar company. Because YouTube has no competition, they completely screw video creators when it comes to Content ID and copyright strikes. They also make the site suck for people who just want to watch videos, bombarding them with ads and so-on. The DMCA is a bad law, but what Google put into place on YouTube goes far beyond what the DMCA requires, and makes it way too easy for rich people / companies to suppress anything they don’t like, while making it difficult for their users. If YouTube had a real free-videos competitor, it would push both of them to offer features that users and/or video uploaders wanted.
It’s pretty cheap
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 stop people from sucking huge bandwith to stream videos just for the minimal amount of sound data attached.
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.
I’m on Calyx but a couple issues have made me wish I had chosen Graphene.
Newpipe ftw.
Sadly, it’s only for Android.
Oh, that’s unfortunate. I’ve never looked into it on other OSs.
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.
This is just wrong. None of those will prevent server side ads.
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.
bro it’s a meme so whatever
cry about it
You really think there’d be an outcry? Rather than it just not being a popular meme format?
murder is hot
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.
Cleaver is a bit more wide to be better at cutting through bone and stuff. I’d say its closer to a santoku knife though usually the tip is more tapered downwards
Nah the blade edge is straight and the spine curves down. Great for chopping small and medium sized vegetables.
Until Google demanded from its vassal (Mozilla) the removal of support for extensions. Mozilla doesn’t have enough resources to do without Google
When did this happen?
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
So open themselves up for more antitrust lawsuits? Telling another browser what to do.
I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can’t differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can’t prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it’s an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.
You would also have to make skipping to any point in the video impossible then as folks could just jump ahead until they are past the embedded ad.
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?
Yes for example if you return always the same segment when skipping.
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.
Twitch already does this for their livestreams and has been doing it for years. I’m just surprised that YouTube has taken this long to get around to injecting advertisements into the video stream. Although I think if YouTube decided to try ad injection the adblocking community would fire back with something novel to thwart their efforts and the eternal arms race would continue.
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.
They work, most of the time. Just a bit clunky.
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.
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 worked at a video ad server that offered a stream stitched solution going back to 2013. It comes down to development work/cost that the companies need to take on. Ultimately they would benefit from the cost required, but they wanted to be cheap and do a client side solution instead.
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.
The HLS integration we offered definitely had a premium attached to it as well as an additional cost to the CDN that required the integration to live on. So it’s not cheap.
It is weird that Google, with it’s infinite pockets, hasn’t pushed a stream stitched solution all these years until recently.
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
You are correct, which goes into the cost category of doing a stream stitched integration. Also, when I left said ad server in 2016, I think I recall HLS streaming primarily supported by Apple devices. Devices like Roku’s (don’t quote me on that) didn’t support it at the time so a lot of companies looked at where the majority of their streaming was occurring and decided it wasn’t worth the hit.
As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.
It already happens, videos contain sponsored segments added by the creator.
But even those have a solution in the form of Sponsorblock, which crowdfunds the location in the video containing sponsored segments in order to skip them.
Google should face the fact that they won’t ever be able to win.
Sponsorblock works with static timestamps provided by users. This would not work if the ads are inserted at randomized times.
Even at randomized times, we could create an algorithm to detect them.
Especially since they are obliged by the EU to clearly label ads. So just look for the label.
Ah ok I didn’t know the EU thing. For the algorithm it’s a cat and mouse game. You could try to detect it by hash signatures of the segments or some kind of image detection but they could in turn add bytes to change the signature or other attributes. Could require a lot of effort on the blocking site to have the indicators up to date.
For even trying to come up with ideas of how Google can fuck us even harder, some of these posters need a necktie from Colombia.
Cause you need to insert it every time for every viewer. People get different ads and those ads obviously change over time. So embedding one ad into the video permanently makes no sense. I’m pretty sure YouTube does it the way they do cause the alternative is not feasible.
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.
Exactly
That wouldn’t make sense in the case of hls since the stream consists of multiple fragments of a video and you would just insert the ad fragments. This would only require changing the index file which could be done again and again with no effort and needs no reencoding of the video file.
maybe ads should not be targeted.
Grayjay ftw
It works really well, I want to support them and donate but I’m afraid YouTube will find a way to block them like they did to others…
