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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
Theres basically a bunch of countries that forbid Twitch or YouTube from playing ads. Like at all.
That’s the point.
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.
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
Not yet