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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

If ads get too annoying people will start running a YouTube frontend and probably switch from on-demand video viewing to a DVR format where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. Maybe the frontend can pretend to have watched the full video and ads, I'm sure that'll go over wonderfully with advertisers.

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>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time.

I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads.

The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the streams for dynamic ads insertion as it gets the next media fragment(s). The new behavior is to have just one indistinguishable stream that's more tightly embedded into the video media fragments.

If the above paragraph doesn't make sense, one can just load up a Youtube video while monitoring the "Network" tab in F12 Developer Tools to see the various media fragments being downloaded while it switches between the normal video and the ads.

It shouldn't be that difficult for video downloaders to learn how to strip out in-video ads. They're going to be a sharp cut both in video and audio, for a specific, fairly-well-known length of time, then a cut back.

And even if platform starts to make blurry transitions for ads, adjust volume/brightness, or even overlay ad text over existing video like a watermark, client can just download the same video multiple times and remove unique frames/pixels.

You can strip the ads from the final video or have the player automatically skip the ads while playing. The client will probably have some way to distinguish sections. Worst case scenario you're just ending up in a DVR-style scenario where you have to press some button to skip +30 seconds in the downloaded file. And eventually someone will make a tool to filter out the ads or crowdsource a solution.

If the ads are in-stream, it should actually make it easier to skip from a frontend interface. If you know or can figure out their length.

It's a given that they'll start and end on keyframes, so you can cut the middle section without losing or re-encoding anything. (It's a given because Google wants to do the opposite - insert them without losing or re-encoding anything. Even if they did re-encode, the sharp transitions would generate keyframes anyway)

This is the kind of thing where people will put a lot of effort to engineer a good machine learning / AI solution to get rid of these ads. If it’s something that people hate they’ll put all their effort into stopping it. Google might’ve actually made their situation worse with this as it’ll force people to innovate and come up with new ways of countering their bs.

“Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as much as a common hatred for something.”

In the book/movie Contact, the person who bankrolls the main character's project made all of his wealth from creating inventions that defeated advertisements.

Or the ~100% of users who wouldn't understand anything you just wrote will shell out for a premium subscription.

Users don't need to understand an ad blocker to use it either, do they?

That said, the predictable next step would just be for Google to turn on DRM on Youtube videos.

if this (ad injection) goes in and becomes a standard - could they argue it is their form of drm and try to take down sponsorblock with dmca crap?

There’s going to be a split between premium and not watching YouTube. I’m not paying something like 2,000$ to per hour of advertising cut from my life.

I might click on a video I find elsewhere, but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos.

> but I’ve basically given up on using the YouTube interface for finding videos

Not just you, youtube has as well.

I already largely watch YouTube through RSS feeds to find the videos and yt-dlp to download them locally. Ads injected straight into the stream will be annoying, but still just as easy to skip as the sponsored content sections of videos. That said, the ads on YouTube have gotten more and more scammy and suspicious over the years, so I don't particularly appreciate being incorporated into the video feed itself. But it doesn't materially change much of how I watch YouTube anyway.

There is some talk that YT are making it such that trying to seek will not skip the ad.

If you have the entire video file downloaded locally they can't stop you from seeking.

There's no reason we can't train local AIs to do ad removal in real time. That will be fun. Will be useful when AR gets popular too.

There already exists the comskip project used by most home-brew PVR software for broadcast TV. I wonder if it could be leveraged for this. See https://github.com/erikkaashoek/Comskip

The downloads would have the ads as well if they're server-side.

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