YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

    For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

    For resilience, maybe settle for similar frames. Thinking about anti-abuse, maybe require a minimum number of reports relative to the views (and ofc allow to not skip stuff).

    • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
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      5 months ago

      Due to legal reasons, and to keep advertisers happy, YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark and a link to the advertisers website. With these, all the required information exists to allow an adblocker to skip any ads embedded in the video stream. No community flagging of ads is required.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        5 months ago

        YouTube is forced to display the “Advertisement” mark

        They’re forced to identify that it’s an ad, but they don’t have to do it in a machine-readable way. There’s many different approaches to show an “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” label that appears to users but thar blockers can’t easily find.

    • SteveTech@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      For ergonomics, the plugin should be able to spot cuts in the video so you can easily select the correct frames.

      This shouldn’t even be too hard, I doubt YouTube is completely rerendering every video with ads, they’d just insert the ad in before an I frame in the video. So each ad will start with an I frame, and the video will resume on an I frame, meaning just let the user select all the I frames, no fancy cut detection algorithm is needed.

      I have no idea how to do this from JS though.

      Also I mean video I frames, not HTML iframes.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      5 months ago

      Let’s go full guerilla: Plugin that lets you select the first and the last frame of an ad, thus allows to report the beginning and length to a synced database. When that frame is found in the buffer, skip X frames ahead.

      This would fit in well with SponsorBlock, which already does the same thing for different parts of videos (eg sponsored segments, intro and outro animations, non music segments in music videos, etc).

      I suspect YouTube will find ways around this, like running ads of differing lengths, add random amounts of padding at the start of the video or between ads, etc.