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Comment by ab_testing | Hacker News Reader

What does ad-free mean? Arent ads embedded in the youtube videos itself such that when you play a long video, multiple ads show up in the beginning, middle and end of the video ?

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No. The ads are separate video files that get played after each other by the browser or youtube app. Since this app is complete independent it just choose to not play the video ads

I hadn't seen a Youtube ad in years, but now Youtube gives "An error occurred. Please try again later." on first load in Safari on a Mac with Wipr. Reloading without blockers gives ads before and every few minutes and some overlays. Miserable.

It's still easy to work around, but maybe Google's getting more aggressive about blockers.

uBlock Origin in Firefox still successfully blocks all ads. Also, youtube-dl continues to work and doesn't download the ads, so media players like mpv can play youtube videos and will never show an ad.

Never had an issue with Firefox and ublock origin.

The ads are delivered separately for now. You bring up an interesting idea; I guess they aren't able to store the ads in the video stream for now.

They can't personlize ads then, unless they are willing to put extreme load on their servers for every video ever requested

Not necessarily. It's possible to splice together compressed video streams without reencoding them. See https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate

In an app's context, I think it means _additional_ ads. In this case though, since on YouTube the ads are not baked into the original video, it also means that you get to watch the content without these ads that are represented by a yellow bar on YouTube.

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