this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I'd enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I'll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
No you don't have to be able to detect it if you can't skip. Since they're injecting the stream directly every time you hit skip they move the counter and when you come back in it just continues to stream you the ad. Just let the time code go negative at the end of the video if you skipped.
All they have to do is not really care about minutes and seconds displaying correctly exactly if you're working around with fast forward. Alternately they could also just disable fast forward and rewind if they detect you're using it to abuse commercials.
I think Sooner or later, pretty much all blocking becomes a store the entire video with commercials and strip the commercials out with comskip end. If you're just storing the buffer off, and stripping it out privately there's not really a lot they can do about that.
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you're saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: "here's a frame", "okay, I watched that frame", "okay, here's the next frame".
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn't work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.
i feel like with a relatively basic audio and visual analysis you could probably get a decently accurate detection of ads, paired with a collective "sponsor block" type system, this would like be very reliable. Even just ignoring the stream info itself.
That depends on what video player you use. Of we have control of that, then sure it works. I use mpv to play things, so for radio streams or live videos I can go back/forward as long as it's cached.
But if it's the web service, even though the browser video player has something cached, the player is still controlled by the website. And considering most of the people use chrome/chromium derivatives or YouTube app, it wouldn't be hard for them to make it so that the player itself will collaborate with whatever they want to do.
If YouTube was a separate organization it wouldn't have been the problem it is because of how Google has been taking over all the different parts they need for advertising.
There will probably be a hundred different tits for tats that we can only both dream of.
In the end, they have some form of knowledge of how many minutes of data they've sent you. You have the entirety of the MPEG stream and a cell phone powerful enough to do things to it.
There are different levels of crazy that can be waged If they were to do something like custom stream encryption to their client. We'd be playing cat and mouse with keys much like satellite dish hacking back in the day.