some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
What would be terrifying about it?
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
Myanmar, as a country, has a GDP of 62.26 billion usd.
Google has a market cap of 2.17 Trillion usd and made a profit of $305 billion usd last year.
Google makes more money in profit than moves through Myanmar in a year by nearly 5 times. If Google chooses not to operate in their country because of some law they don’t like, what’s to stop them?
Google definitely has national government level influence, especially considering the pervasiveness of their product suite. Implying that they’re above the law might be too far, but they for sure influence it.
If the most extreme happens and Google decided that some EU law was too much to deal with compared to the gains, a lot of Europeans could find themselves in a position where Google doesn’t operate in their country. Imagine every Android device becoming unable to use the majority of the service they operate on, or the most common browser, search engine, email service, and video streaming services simultaneously being disabled. I can’t imagine the people will be very happy about that.
It kinda depends where. GDPR in the EU is certainly an example of governments imposing their will on corporations. In the US, not so much, as corporations dump tons of money on lobbying that allow to them influence how they are regulated.
‘oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary’
On the surface it sounds like a gross overreach of government.
A government that hates ads as much as I do. Truly a nightmare scenario
Trust me, I hate them also. But they also fund a lot of great things. And there are ways to have ads that are not invasive or omnipresent.
That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
Good to know. I’d rather pay for a vpn than YouTube premium.
I’m wondering how the hell YouTube even makes money in those regions then. They must operate there at a massive loss.
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Humanity accepts your challenge! See y’all on the battlefield ;-)
lights molotov cocktail
…
“are we not going to do that, or…? asking for a friend, of course”
That comes later but I like the energy.
We can do it the old fashioned way
Where is that image from?
A show called ‘The Good Place’. Good show imo.
Ah ok cool, thanks I watched I think the first season. Need to finish it.
You can solve any problem with a Molotov cocktail. Any time I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom, right away, I had a different problem!
But we fixed this already, it was called TiVo…
This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.
There’s already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won’t even take that long.
That’s “crowdsourced”, i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.
I see a good use case for AI, can also be crowd sourced.
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That’s actually hurt by this because it uses timestamps supplied by users to work. But now they are off because the ads are of variable length. We can just hope that YouTube keeps the ability to link to a specific timestamp because then it has to calculate the difference and that can be used by Sponsorblock and adblockers alike.
But then those ads either need to be skippable or not skippable with some kind of metadata which can be used against it by injected scripts.
The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.
Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.
The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.
And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.
I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.
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Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it’s inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn’t corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.
But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it’s like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it’s even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it’s able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.
Ad blockers will find a way.
Re-encoding is one thing, but ads are more or less supposed to be dynamic based on user location and likely some other data to target them.
Offloading that to the client made a lot of sense but now they have to do this server-side, they have very smart people working on making this as efficient as possible using tricks you’ve mentioned and more but it is still more effort than before. All for something that will likely be circumvented eventually.
All of that targeting data lives on Google’s servers already. Your computer isn’t trying to figure out who you are and what you like each ad play, Google already knows who you are when your browser makes a request for a video. Everything you are talking about is already server-side.
The data is but the client gets the specific bits from a CDN. Now they need a server to stitch these server side and stream it to you.
You can check the SponsorBlock FAQ about this. They do not need to do additional reprocessing
Every bit of effort and resourcing they spend on this returns revenue directly. Which is more than they can probably say for a lot of things they do. And they’re smart enough to know that they can’t eliminate blocking, just make it harder and harder so that fewer and fewer people do it.
YouTube’s next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube
Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.
you’re actually helping by lowering the amount of revenue they have to shuffle offshore and hide from the feds.
How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can’t be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you’ll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It’s called SSAP, and I’ve been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they’ve pretty much broken their player to implement this.
Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here
Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can’t guarantee for much more.
edit: fixed wording
Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?
Yeah, there’s ways around this. It’s just that most of the ublock origin blocking specific code, isn’t reusable here and the team will need to start over to deal with this new tactic/approach from Google.
The cure might eventually be worse than the disease though. If not now, or tomorrow, then the next day.
I’ll let the ublock team carve demonic sigils into me and sacrifice my grandma if that’s what it escalates to, I’d sooner lose YouTube entirely than sit through those ads
You could also use something like GrayJay, I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.
I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.
If I can’t watch with adblock I’ll just stop using it, it’s only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.
Same, just like when reddit killed 3rd party apps
Yup, and I’m not willing to pay for Youtube Premium because the app kinda sucks and I don’t like Google keeping track of what I watch. I’m willing to pay, but I’d really like to keep using the 3rd party apps I prefer (Grayjay and NewPipe).
So like Reddit, I’ll drop Youtube if my 3rd party apps stop working. That’s my line in the sand. If Youtube wants to get money from me, it needs to be through an API disassociated from my identity.
Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
The only option left would be PeerTube if it federated with every other PeerTube instance by default, like Lemmy
Wishfull thinking. Sadly the truth.
It’s nearly impossible to have that high of a federation and preventing a centralization to not loose any videos (except if the creators chose so).damn
Nebula is interesting. You pay for a subscription, which funds creators and platform costs.
So… YouTube Premium.
Same for Floatplane
Sounds like a survivable approach. Except: has anyone heard of it? I hadn’t.
It’s owned and populated by history and science/engineering YouTubers, so if you’re not usually watching that side of YouTube, you might not find much on Nebula for you.
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it’s attracting are ones that don’t want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
The alternative should be libraries hosting the peoples internet.
You may balk at the idea, much like you would have at the idea of free public libraries when originally conceived.
How can a competitor that is courting people that aren’t revenue sources compete
I like youtube, i use it quite a lot. I wouldn’t use it at all without ad and sponsor block. I don’t know how so many people do it, it’s crazy to me.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
It sounds like there’s a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
But you are correct
That’s what the article says, not me! lol
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status of the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn’t insert the ads? I don’t see why that would need to be client side.
YT already scrapped (or broke) setting the start/end timestamps for embedded videos. That hasn’t worked for at least the last few weeks. Embed videos now always start at 0
I embedded a video yesterday with a start timestamp and it worked
Did they change the params or something?
I have YT embed support in Tesseract, and videos with timestamps broke a few weeks ago (they all start at 0 now). I’ve tried both
t=andstart=formats: neither worked.You can still link to the YT video directly with those, though, but I’ve been unable to get embeds to honor them.
‘t=’ works for me, but I’m just right clicking and getting it manually to put in docs.
Hmm. Like a Word doc? Maybe it’s just embeds (with timestamps) on other websites that are broken?
I tried using the embed URLs directly in a browser tab, and those refuse to play at all (they still work embedded, though).
Definitely something that changed in the last few weeks. The test posts I had are from months ago and worked then.
Ya on second thought, I don’t think I’m using embedding in the best way and what I’m saying isn’t really related to that. I’m not actually embedding anything.
I’m prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
I mean, I’ll just continue to not use Youtube…
I will see you on peertube ;)
I really wish this would gain some traction. As it is, there is just not enough content there to compete with YouTube in any reasonable way.
Well the problem here is that youtubers need some type of monetization too for compensation. Idk Peertube can solve this without ads.
Paid subscriptions per month, you watch the newest video for free. Have the youtuber host the server themselves for their own videos and federate that access.
Would incentivize more evergreen content too.
This is new to me; are there any decent android apps for it?
PeerTube has a variety of third-party applications for Android, desktop, and a few other platforms.
They’re working on creating an official android app that’s all I know.
I don’t see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
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DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
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Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They’re just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They’re also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It’ll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it’s unknown to caches, it’s updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
I’ve tested making new subdomains, it’s literally minutes in real life. Sure, in some pathological case it might be hours, but it’s not actually going to happen realistically.
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It’s not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can’t skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don’t have them, ytdl also doesn’t download them.
As of now, afaik, you won’t see them if your account wasn’t selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you’ll see the normal ads and then the video).
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I’ve only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There’s already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
It doesn’t recognize the sponsor sections. The community does that. I don’t believe there is any tool right now that can automatically detect the sponsor sections.
It’s probably going to be like twitch. I’m sure they’ll eventually succeed in making it so you can stream videos without watching ads but they’ll never be able to stop people from downloading the video and skipping the ad in vlc.
Can’t you block ads on twitch?
In live videos they replace what you’re watching
Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a “Download and edit to watch ad-free” world with this change.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a “report ad” or “see the product” buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
I accept having to wait until the video downloads past the ad. Certainly not going to watch the ad.
