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Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: I didn't read carefully. Ignore the first sentence.

~There's already a tool called SponsorBlock which in conjunction with FreeTube or Invidious can automatically skip portions of videos tagged as sponsorships or ads.~ I don't see server injected ads being a long-term problem for people who use blockers or third-party players. It just shifts the problem to the "analog hole".

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The OP is written by the developer of SponsorBlock, if they say it's a problem I'll take their word for it.

I didn't actually notice that.

If you read the linked thread this is causing issues with the offsets SB currently uses. That aside YT will have the ability to inject ads dynamically based on region or whatever other signals they use for targeting. Consequently no two copies of the same video are guaranteed to have the same length.

The link goes to a post by the author of SponsorBlock

Did you follow the submission link at all? It's from SponsorBlock explaining that this change breaks their things.

It seems like this could be easily defeated via random ad injection.

Random ad injection is easily defeated by services like that. They’d just need to fingerprint ever N second window of the video, and then drop stuff that isn’t included across multiple plays.

I wish video distribution would move to self hosting or some other decentralized model though.

And could this be defeated because the video itself is static and identifying the ad would then be around the unexpected changes to it? :D

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