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Comment by techwiz137 | Hacker News Reader

They will try and fail. The solution that will be left...is one that many will not like, especially if your personal and/or work email is on Google.

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I'm not sure why they would fail if they really wanted to.

From what I understand, currently, the ads are distinct videos, which is why external tools can block them. For example, you don't get ads with youtube-dl.

But if Youtube used the uploaded video to create a new one, with ads injected in it, I can't see how adblockers could block that reliably. Perhaps you could build a database of timestamp of ads per video? And hope that the compute power required to build new videos with ads in it is too much to be done widely?

What am I missing?

Like, per video on the server stitch in ads to the video file before serving it up? You'd still have to have specific behaviours encoded to specific segments of that video file (i.e. clicking on the video during ad should link somewhere different than clicking on the video during the video), and that would probably be detectable.

Inserting ads directly into the video stream doesn't seem to be counterable, no? It's not cheap, but might be worth it.

I've seen a browser extension that analyzes the video using AI to detect the sponsored segments, so detecting the ads would be probably even easier since they are even more disconnected from the normal content than sponsors.

Which one uses AI? The ones I've seen use crowdsourced timecodes, and AI seems like a better solution.

Sponsorblock can already block the youtuber's own ads where they tell you how great raid shadow legends is and to like and subscribe.

SponsorBlock works because those parts are at the same times for all viewers.

I'm not sure what solution you are referring to.

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