Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn’t match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
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.
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
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.
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
I mean, I’ll just continue to not use Youtube…
I will see you on peertube ;)
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.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
The day I’m forced to watch YouTube ads is the day I’ll stop using it.
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.
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.
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.
Yet bittorrent does youtube fives times over with central governance. You have drunk too much cloud coolaid. My laptop could host my youtube channel without issue and I would still have enough juice to play counter strike and download the latest marvel slop movie.
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON’T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom’s coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
Not scam ads, intrusive ads. A decade ago i read cracked and the only ads were non intrusive sidebar ads or a banner at the top. They didn’t play music, they didn’t interrupt what i was doing, they just existed. Google, being the near complete monopoly it is, could easily force the standard to return to that and many people would never even go looking for adblockers.
I was using that as an umbrella term though I should have specified both scam ads and intrusive ads that are a vector for malware.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don’t watch ads. Ads don’t need to be “scam ads” for me to not watch them. I just don’t. Full stop.
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
No. They make money if they find a sponsor. I also skip over those sponsors’ ads but the sponsors don’t know that or they accept a certain fraction of people not watching their ads. I just don’t watch ads. If, in the future, that means I cannot watch my favourite tubers’ content, well too bad, I’ll watch some ad-free netflix series or read a book or whatever. But one thing is certain: I’ll rather light my dick on fire than watching ads. I even joined a class action lawsuit against amazon because they want to make me watch ads without my consent.
But if you’re paying for Netflix, why wouldn’t you simply pay for a premium account that doesn’t show you the ads? Is the content from your favorite YouTubers really that bad in comparison? I’ll admit, for me, it’s absolutely the opposite.
I am subscribed to amazon prime, mainly because of the benefits I have regarding shopping. I might cancel that subscription however. I am really annoyed right now because they changed their return policy and they try to force ads on me while at the same time reporting their modt profitable quarter.
Begun the arms race have .
Just wait until someone trains an AI to recognize and skip ads.
Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over
Why not use that screen time to promote alternative to YouTube?. Or even a simple Fuck google screen : " insert why google sucks here".
What if we replaced their ads with our ads? What do you mean that defeats the purpose?
Not if it brings people to a user controlled FLOSS platform (Peertube for example ) and make them ditch Youtube. We need to move the viewers and content to FLOSS alternatives so anything that will bring new users is good. Youtube will be the biggest battle IMO. Plus it would be kind of fun to trash Youtube on their own platform. Let’s settle for an optional functionality.
Let me simplify this for you: If I’m getting an addon to stop seeing ads, I’m not going to choose an addon that replaces them with other ads. I will choose the addon that doesn’t give me ads.
The only people who would even consider such an addon are not the target audience for the ads because they already support it.
What if I offer you an add-on that would promote healthy life-habits instead of black screen? Would you be interested in that? For example, it’s important to squeeze the sponge after using it, this would be super useful to remind you about it!That’s just an example, there are dozens of small tips like that requires a daily reminder.
People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
