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SponsorBlock (and DeArrow): "YouTube is currently experimenting with server-si…" - Fosstodon (fosstodon.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.

This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.

For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.

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[-] robber@lemmy.ml 104 points 2 weeks ago

Step by step, it seems, YouTube is evolving into something that has previously been called TV.

[-] Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 2 weeks ago

If they carry on with this bullshit I'll be dropping them entirely for Nebula. I quite enjoy Nebula so far.

[-] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Support a federated open source peertube instance instead of proprietary centralized paywalled garbage like Nebula. Just because the shittification isn't there yet doesn't mean it won't be as soon as it gets a bit more popular.

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[-] WallEx@feddit.de 10 points 2 weeks ago

There is quite a variety of services like that, curiosity stream is another one.

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[-] Gacrux@lemm.ee 75 points 2 weeks ago

does this mean stuff like yt-dlp will download videos with ads in thrm as well?

[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 40 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Almost certainly not, although fair disclaimer, I don't actually know. Ads need to be tailored to the user when delivered, so it's likely the YouTube frontend requesting the next chunk of video to be an ad instead of the next chunk of video from blob storage. yt-dlp likely just requests successive chunks straight from blob storage, passing this.

If YouTube served ads by saying "point to an ad chunk next" in their blob storage, 1. Everyone would see the same ad and 2. Premium users would still see ads.

To patch this, YouTube really needs to stop serving video chunks directly from storage, but I forget the reason they haven't done that already.

(Technical note; I'm assuming blob storage chunks contain 1-2 seconds of video and metadata pointing to the next one, like a linked list. I'm not sure if this is how YouTube works, but many video platforms do this)

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[-] Mikina@programming.dev 73 points 2 weeks ago

Looks like I'll finally get a reason to cut off another website I hate using, but never found the willpower to get rid off.

Good

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[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 63 points 2 weeks ago

I wonder how that will interoperate with timestamps provided by users in comments or by the video creator themselves. Maybe those can be used to detect inserted ads.

[-] baggins@lemmy.ca 33 points 2 weeks ago

The server must have to send some metadata to the client telling when it's running an ad because there are other things that need to happen client side during that like adjusting of the time or making the ad clickable

[-] ayaya 21 points 2 weeks ago

I have actually been seeing some timestamps that are completely wrong lately, maybe this is why.

[-] limewire@lemmy.cafe 60 points 2 weeks ago

I'm kinda surprised they haven't done this already. Twitch has been doing this for a while now, and the only reliable way around it is to use a proxy in a country that Twitch doesn't run ads in.

[-] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 24 points 2 weeks ago

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to "be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder" as a result.

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[-] recursive_recursion@programming.dev 48 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I wonder if this is where AI might be useful where it's used to filter out all of the megacorp ads, popups, and other random garbage?

train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
- sponsorblock adds this as a toggleable option just like the "skip segment" UI video overlay button

[-] AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com 24 points 2 weeks ago

Using AI to fuck the megacorps would be amazing. Using their own tools against them.

[-] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 18 points 2 weeks ago

Sounds wasteful, detection of ads could be detected with regular software, no?

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[-] FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee 14 points 2 weeks ago

That would be cool.

I guess my AMD Bulldozer TV PC is gonna have to go in the ewaste bin though. Its already stretched to its limit running Linux Mint, Firefox, uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock as it is

[-] spiderman@ani.social 13 points 2 weeks ago

imagine using Gemini for this, would be peak irony.

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[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 36 points 2 weeks ago

I miss the times when ads were just annoying gifs on the left or right side of a web page. Then they evolved, abusing javascript, to become pop ups that hid the URL bar and opened 3 dozen different pop ups while you didn't close the mother popup. Then they started clickjacking: that close ad button? Just opens another ad. Ad infinitum.

Now, effectively editing the video to add an ad somewhere instead of serving it as a side file. The advertising industry as a whole feels like the absolute worst villains at a personal level, because they want to target you individually.

[-] ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 weeks ago

Google ads were originally a panacea for really bad popups of the early 2000s. Google had a strict list of dos and don'ts, and ad revenues were high enough that most websites only ran one or two.

[-] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 25 points 2 weeks ago

It was inevitable (and is arguably the "logical" extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads...

[-] casmael@lemm.ee 21 points 2 weeks ago

Wow that’s very annoying. What does this mean for the future of adblocking?

[-] MinusPi@pawb.social 42 points 2 weeks ago

It'll be difficult for a while until someone figures it out and then it'll be easy again. It's just an arms race.

[-] Lianodel@ttrpg.network 24 points 2 weeks ago

The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That's all.

So I'm not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn't even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.

[-] gjghkk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 weeks ago

Capitalism is in the end, fighting for monopoly. They rather lose money in foreseeable future, and probably ever, than allow adblockers do their thing for small user-base. Because they want max. control. I can only assume companies that do not go to arms race with their consumers are thee ones that aren't public traded companies.

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[-] bountygiver@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 weeks ago

it would require government intervention. Where a regulation must declare that ads must clearly be labelled as ads, so that adjustments can be made by detecting when is the ad segment happening.

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[-] elxeno@lemm.ee 15 points 2 weeks ago

This one might be harder, if YT just sends the ad like it was part of the video file, generating it on the fly, it's a lot harder to detect, and probably not too hard for them to do, but breaking timestamps is pretty bad for some types of videos, like tutorials.

[-] mister_newbie@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 weeks ago

I think the larger content creators will push back against this, precisely due to the timestamp issue.

[-] Hana@beehaw.org 14 points 2 weeks ago

Sponsorblock "just" needs to transition from timestamps to timestamps + image hash. Not easy, but not impossible.

[-] probableprotogen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 2 weeks ago

Jesus fucking christ YouTube really hates users

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 weeks ago

Advertising is poison.

We could just ban it.

[-] ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 24 points 2 weeks ago

People will say, "but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?"

To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 weeks ago

See Flash websites ripping each other off for five years on either side of Youtube's introduction.

See Bittorrent moving more video than Netflix until like 2012.

See twenty years of web-based P2P experiments. Weirdos with fat hard drives (hi) will always be happy to seed.

Or - crazy thought - services could cost money. It would not take much. Youtube's not getting ten bucks each time you watch a video. Bandwidth and storage keep getting cheaper. Nor are they paying for content, unlike Netflix and so on, and those fuckers are also considering ads.

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[-] dRLY@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 weeks ago

At least it should still work with the hard coded sponsor spots that are actually part of the videos (like the "brought to you by Manscaped" or whatever).

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 25 points 2 weeks ago

Only if the ads are a fixed length and always in the same place for each playback of the same video.

Inserting ads of various lengths in varying places throughout the video will alter all the time stamps for every playback.

The 5th minute of the video might happen 5min after starting playback, or it could be 5min+a 2min ad break after starting. This could change from playback to playback; so basing ad/sponsor blocking on timestamps becomes entirely useless.

[-] matto@lemm.ee 18 points 2 weeks ago

Also, if the ads where in different parts of the video every time, it would not be possible to use SponsorBlock for them :(

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[-] FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 weeks ago

If they are part of the video you cant just skip them like any other part of the video, right?

[-] aCosmicWave@lemm.ee 16 points 2 weeks ago

Different users would see unique ads. So your ad could be 12 seconds long while my ad is 30 seconds long. A timestamp based skip would no longer work universally.

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[-] Xirup@yiffit.net 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Wouldn't this also completely break ad blockers?

[-] mihnt@lemmy.ca 24 points 2 weeks ago

Nah, it would just circumvent them.

[-] jesterkun@midwest.social 14 points 2 weeks ago

Genuinely I'd be fine if someone made a thing that when an ad started a black overlay would go up and the spund would be muted.

[-] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Switch to 3rd party clients like pipe-viewer (doesn't need api key), it's less likely (though I suppose not impossible) google would roll this out against 3rd party clients as they can't track you for targeted ads.

To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)

[-] Bongles@lemm.ee 11 points 2 weeks ago

To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)

Peertube is fine, but like lemmy (but worse), there's barely anything there. Nebula at least got creators from YouTube to make ad-free versions for Nebula. If the channels that a person are subscribed to don't exist in Peertube, that's not an appealing alternative for them.

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 weeks ago

If they are injecting ads into the actual video stream; it won't matter what client you use. You request the next video chunk for playback and get served a chunk filled with advertising video instead. The clients won't be able to tell the difference unless they start analyzing the actual video frames. That's an entirely server-side decision that clients can't bypass.

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[-] dvdnet62@feddit.nl 11 points 2 weeks ago

I think make ad run faster can circumvent this. wdyt? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=e https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en