But yeah, I do tend to watch most of my videos through youtube-dl these days, even though the HTML5 player works fine for me in Firefox without any ads.
I work for video site and wrote the player we use, and this is exactly that I think would be happening. Our player has a similar issue, and it even sometimes occurs with no ad blocker.
The player I wrote loads ads via the VAST specification, which is pretty much what the entire web uses for ads. This means we have to make a client side request for an xml document, parse it, then see if it has an ad unit we can show. Even if we don't get an ad there can end up being multiple round trips due to the way VAST and the ad networks work, thus delay.
I've seen at least two other popular video sites over the years that had this symptom. (Can't remember them, maybe Hulu 6+ years ago?) One of them would occasionally have a weird overlap of the end of a commercial and the video. My guess was that the video was was queued to start playing after the length of the ad by some ad-independent logic.
how do you find the video you want without using youtube? do you just use the youtube search interface then download the video by copying the url (w/o even clicking on the link to start the video buffer)
Or, for something sufficiently ephemeral, I'll hand the URL directly to mpv and let it stream. Particularly useful if I suspect I won't care to watch the entire video. And I find mpv's player interface far better than YouTube's.
Occasionally I still use the browser video player as well.
If you want to completely bypass the web interface, you can subscribe to channels by RSS.
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/02/new-command-line-youtube-play...
incidentally, you could also just use google.
That's exactly how Chinese video websites like Youku and Sohu Video work.
So you also concluded: it's not a bug, but an intentional "feature" to suppress ad-blockers
lol, no malice here, it's their websites they can do whatever they want and they are far from stupid, they test all these things.
I'll still block ads and if Google prevents me from seeing Youtube content so be it. I'm not going to disable my ad blocker anyway.
The fight against ads is getting interesting. Let's see who gets the "last word".
It should show up in production monitoring, though.
(Also, I was using the phrase as a callback to the classic expression; I changed it to "intended behavior" to better reflect my intent.)
> the question then becomes how much they can do so
> without driving some traffic to secondary sites