Hacker News Reader

Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

> which in my mind would have no problems skipping whatever "injected" ads show up since this is already what that application does

SponsorBlock contributors tag certain parts of the video where the video creators talk about sponsored products, or self-advertise. These timestamps are fixed, as the video creator uploads a single video for distribution.

If YouTube dynamically injects additional ads on a user-by-user or region-by-region basis, not only will these ads all have different lengths and timestamps, making SponsorBlock ineffective, but will also render existing tagged segments obsolete, as they are now offset by the length of any preceeding injected ads.

View on HN

> will also render existing tagged segments obsolete, as they are now offset by the length of any preceeding injected ads.

By the same mechanic, it would also invalidate all the timestamps that people put in video descriptions and comments. Are you sure YouTube would do that?

As the article hints, youtube does know how long and at what positions the injected ads are. So they could use this information to skip to user-supplied timestamps correctly. The question then becomes, whether Adblockers could use this information to skip the ads.

It's a cat and mouse game.

> The question then becomes, whether Adblockers could use this information to skip the ads. It's a cat and mouse game.

I wouldn't call it a cat and mouse game because there is nothing from a technical point of view that prevents adblockers to use this information to skip ads. Unless YouTube gets completely rid of the concept of timestamps for their videos, they will always lose this battle.

They could make the timestamp conversion very Server-Side or create a very unwieldy API where it's difficult to collect all ad segments via timestamp sampling.

> they could use this information to skip to user-supplied timestamps correctly

If that information is available, it can be gathered by adblockers to guesstimate how the video has been offset, and then you're back to square one.

If "clean" videos are still available (which they likely will be via youtube premium), you still have a reference of how the video should look, so you can start tagging suspicious sections as soon as they are categorically avoided by the youtube "timestamp fixer".

Sure, it will become harder as the frequency of mangled videos increase, worst case every single user will get their unique rendered video, but I think the performance hit on youtube would be immense, because AFAIK you cannot simply cut together separate video streams, even if they are aligned in encoding, resolution and everything beforehand, because it will break keyframes and create artifacts unless transcoded.

If the frequency is relatively low (say, one video per nation or US state) then adblock efforts can just adapt, the existing sponsorblock implementation could probably still work with some modifications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com