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Comment by scohesc | Hacker News Reader

My terminology may be wrong, but I would assume these ad-blockers are great until streaming platforms catch up and embed ads directly into the video stream.

Twitch is getting close to that. They directly inject video ads into streams at random times causing you to miss parts of streams. uBlock Origin seemed to have a way around that with some extra setup but it's only a matter of time before it's completely transparent, seamless, and technically unblockable by client-side addons.

Part of me wonders why they haven't done so yet.

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There is also sponsorblock (at least for YT):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock

Which also integrates with ytdlp. I run an instance of metube. If I want to watch a longer video I throw the video there, it downloads it, strips the sponsor stuff and makes it available on Plex.

I tried Sponsorblock for a while, mainly for getting all the garbage out of LTT vids. But I ended up turning it off because it always seems to jump a little to soon and a little too far. So it will jump from mid sentence to mid another sentence seemingly out of nowhere, which got to be too disorienting for me. Now I just use it for the little green marker and skip manually.

Segments are provided by community members, and you can adjust/edit them if you're finding the segment to be badly timed yourself.

Also useful for skipping intros and recaps. Saves time for hn lurking.

Those are fine by me. My problem with ad networks is that my machine is caught in the middle of upholding the contract between the advertiser and the presenter. That's their problem, not mine. I don't want to be part of that in anyway and I have every right to refuse to be. That and the personal tracking across sites, the sooner that dies, the better off we'll all be. With all that stuff gone, "ad" will finally be the correct term to use. No other form of advertising ever got to do those things.

The silver lining of the current state of embedding the ads into the video itself at least is the creator makes the deal directly with the advertiser, rather than through YouTube.

But you're suggesting that YouTube alter the video to insert the ads, which wouldn't be the same thing. IDK how that would scale (processing uploaded videos seems to take a while still on YouTube, and splicing video in a way that gives YT the continued control over dynamically displaying targeted ads could be a Hard Problem), but if anyone can figure that out, it'd be YT.

This is how podcast ads generally work- the adtech can splice a targeted ad directly into the audio file, even when streaming in real time.

Right? The fact that YT hasn't started doing that leads me to believe it's harder than we think.

The best YouTubers also make the sponsored part of their videos a distinct block that can be skipped. I appreciate that.

I'm also generally less offended by "dumb" advertising, where everybody consuming the same media receives the same advertisements. It doesn't contribute to a surveillance capitalism dystopia to nearly the same degree as the carefully chosen for you advertising schemes.

Ublock used to hide all the hulu ads for me, now some get through but its more than satisfying seeing the other 6 god damn ads just blink through when they don't load. I'll deal with a Hyundai or apple commercial if I don't have to deal with 8 more every 5 minutes.

My half-serious and half-assed attempt at solving a similar problem: make a bot watch the video for you first, then skip the crap.

https://butter.sonnet.io

That is such a well made website, love the art.

So it can tell when videos contain sponsored segments just from the video's content? What parameters does it check to make its conclusion?

Thanks!

It's quite primitive:

1. I have a service extracting captions from YT videos.

2. I process them a little bit (parallel batches with a sliding window containing the captions),

3. then add to a simple GPT-4 prompt with some examples.

Feel free to check the repo source (esp. detector.js and its dependencies)

There is "Sponsorblock" for YouTube, which allows you to skip over adds which are part of the video.

> Part of me wonders why they haven't done so yet

I’ve wondered if they know that they’ll lose numbers of users, which is an important metric for selling space to advertisers.

That’s not easy from a technical standpoint.

A lot of radios do that and it ruins radio streaming, especially if you're flipping between them a lot.

Youtubers I follow are doing just that.

Have a look at SponsorBlock. It automatically skips this kind of ads as long as someone contributed the time stamps.

I just let my YouTube Premium lapse, but I'll check that out the next time I pick it back up.

it's a never-ending cat and mouse game. there is no "end state".

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