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I've always found it a mark of stellar incompetence that YouTube hasn't done ad injection into the video stream, dynamically on the server side. It's to my advantage, so I'm not complaining, but this is a company that ignored adblockers for years, and when it started fighting them, half-assed even that (I see no ads even now).

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If they inject video, I can skip ahead. If they lock playback for that time, I can skip ahead programmatically.

Can you? If they track the time the user began watching the video, they can refuse to send you any more of the actual video until the duration of the ad is complete.

Have the client prebuffer the video, start playback after $TOTAL_AD_LENGTH.

Buffering seems to have been chunked for a long time now, though. Ten years ago we could buffer an entire video. Now it’s limited to about 5% at a time. I guess that’s how the chunked HLS streams and such work, and YT could probably avoid serving certain chunks without some unique token received from watching the ad.

Shhh! Don't give them ideas.

No problem. They plainly don't read the tech sites.

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