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> Wouldn't this be trivial to defeat by pulling the playlist multiple times (maybe via a proxy to get a different IP), and only showing the chunks which did not change?

Since the YouTube marks ads, I guess pulling the playlist twice won't really be needed. YouTube's player should somehow know when the ad starts and when it ends after all.

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Good point. One could probably patch the javascript on the fly to go from unskippable ad to auto-skip....

Regarding autoskip, I have an interesting experience with it in the past.

My friend asked me to write a userscript that simulates pressing the "Skip ad" button, so he won't stain his mouse with grease while eating.

Checking if there is a "Skip ad" button every quarter of a second and invoking its click() method eliminated the video ads completely. As it turns out, the button existed alongside the 5 second countdown, just wasn't visible.

I don't know if it still works the same way today, but it felt good to accidentally make an effective adblock with five lines of code.

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