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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. 98 comments
@iain the ui needs to change to include ad links, so the data for when ads happen should still be retrievable _somewhere_ in the page. Then just a bit of math It'd be pretty fuckin poggers if you could also use this data to skip the injected ads! Also thanks for making such a great extension! @gimmechocolate @sponsorblock @iain I don't think you can. Ads will have different lengths depending on our you got a 5s one, a 15s unskippable or a 30+s skippable ad @GwenTheKween @gimmechocolate @sponsorblock @iain and the YouTube client side code in the browser will need to understand and deal with each of these situations, meaning the dom environment of the page will need to contain this info, meaning an ad blocker can make use of it @sponsorblock @iain fingers crossed 
wow when/if this reaches me it might be time to break my youtube addiction and say goodbye to google @sponsorblock according to this pinned thread on uBO's subreddit, youtube devs and adblock devs are in a pretty heated fight, like, right now that thread gives you an idea of the kind of overengineered obfuscated overdone mess the youtube website is google is going way too far to temporarily inconvenience adblock users @mrblissett @soop I wonder if they're a/b testing that; email is still categorized there as well as their injected fake-email ads for me but it would not shock me for them to put the latter in main too, ugh. @KayOhtie @mrblissett i feel like when it comes to potentially controversial changes corpos use a/b testing to reduce any backlash @soop @mrblissett they should actually listen to the backlash then cause it seems like half the time they don't  @KayOhtie @soop @mrblissett sadly if the testing makes a big corp more money they'll ignore all backlash and go ahead with it it seems @soop @sponsorblock YouTube devs or YouTube managers/execs? Wild to think they've fired any dev who thinks it's scummy but does the work anyway and finally found the pool of devs who like ads @KayOhtie I know ads can be accessibility issue. But being able to block them never was intended functionality. So where is the scum.  @drawnto @KayOhtie If your Internet Service Provider bans some of the Internet resources, it stops being an Internet Service Provider becomes a subset-of-the-Internet-provider and should be liable for false advertising because it's scummy. By the same logic, if a video hosting starts serving back videos that differ from what uploaded, it stops being a video hosting.
That we can agree on. It's less scum than monarchy & feudalism right now but that's hardly a good thing. @realestninja @sponsorblock you should try adding the filters from the pinned comment on the reddit thread i've mentioned  @sponsorblock@fosstodon.org what the FUCK :blobfoxfloofexplode:   @sponsorblock …wonder if there’s enough metadata exposed to determine new offsets and block the injected ads? like, maybe something can be pulled from the transcript from known good submissions? probably not accurate enough to make submissions on an injected video work properly, but. @sponsorblock YouTube is freakishly devoted to staying with a monetization plan that has never worked for them and is currently not working for them  @comradevlast @sponsorblock Except it IS working for them. They're just not content with obscene profits and want even more obscene profits, but they're incompetent and going to end up reducing profits. @dalias@hachyderm.io @comradevlast@mastodon.social @sponsorblock@fosstodon.org the fact that YouTube will demonentize someone for saying fuck and then shows porn ads tell you everything you need to know about them. They exist only to make profit. @dalias @comradevlast @sponsorblock I really would like to know how much costs all these server and the huge storage.    I agree with the person who said that, if necessary, they will watch a black, silent rectangle with a countdown timer, until the ad has passed.  @sponsorblock I am surprised they haven't tried this yet tbh. If the video is directly in the stream, it is much harder to block it. @sponsorblock They are spending a lot of time and money to ensure that people see ads. Be great if they invested that much energy into improving the user experience   And @sponsorblock is investing a lot of time and money into playing along with Google's game. Imagine if all that were spent on improving the user experience on open platforms, so we could stop playing Google's game! (Yet, thanks for the effort! It sure improves life for YouTube consumers, I just don't consider it sustainable.)   @sponsorblock@fosstodon.org this is why I always have newpipe as a backup for my subscriptions, and have that list locally backed up. I also just dont stay logged in on my web browser and only stay logged in on the youtube revanced patched app with no google services, and use cookie auto delete to always delete cookies unless I want them saved. We will always find ways to get around googles bullshit, they are just making it more difficult for the average actual user.   @sponsorblock thank you for your work I also like to mention the wonderfull app https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular that's take advantage of sponsorblock  @sponsorblock If they stopped spending so much money on trying to circumvent ad bypassing tools they wouldn't have to worry so much about the money lost due to ad bypassing tools @sponsorblock@fosstodon.org So, Youtube now following Twitch decision with their server-side ad injection and forced login that caught using VPN, some third party clients unusable in next years @sponsorblock I also noticed that they removed references to their RSS feeds from the HTML document. Those feeds are now no longer easily discoverable. Luckily they are still generated for now. Should they stop providing those RSS feeds for channels and playlists, I might stop following YouTube creators altogether. What Google is doing to YouTube is currently my main driver for reducing the usage of Google services even further. E. g. I finally switched my primary search engine away from them. @s1dul Brave Search for web and video searches and Google for image searches. I chose Brave, as, unlike Bing, it manages to find more relevant results and a more diverse set of websites I really miss functioning search parameters and filters though (I have to still use Google for that) and would like to find a better, preferably non-American, alternative.  @sponsorblock The day sponsor block and ad block stops working is the day I stop using YouTubr all together. @ThePinkHacker But if you can add your followed YT channels in your RSS feed and if you choose the right reader, the videos will show up embedded in the feed where you can watch the video right there without ads. I use BazQux Reader. @delosmzp If they embed it into the video stream, then they'll have the same issues @ThePinkHacker The issues being ads? Will have to see if YT fully rolls this out and how SponcorBlock accommodates this new issue. For now - I see no ads like this. @sponsorblock jeeze. Does Sponsor block record video length info at all, or there a way to snag that metadata accurately without ads in order to calculate offsets? @KayOhtie yes, but video length can also change because the uploader can cut parts of it (or uncut) @sponsorblock@fosstodon.org Question: Does it still disable if I am using Premium?  @sponsorblock When you download your own video, you're getting it complete with ads? If so, that would be pretty fucked up :)  @uberprutser @sponsorblock that's what I'm afraid of - there will be no way to get a clean copy back ever again.  @vxo @uberprutser @sponsorblock unless you as the uploader login and download it from the studio site. @sponsorblock I only use newpipe and invidious to make YouTube lost money and protect my privacy. The day sponsorblock and new pipe give up on YouTube war is the day I bid YouTube adieu. This sounds like it will affect the download tools like "yt-dlp" too. I guess I need to brush-up on my com-skipping skills. @sponsorblock Waow. Funny. I was expecting Youtube for more than 10 years to start doing that, as it would be the only way to insert almost unblockable ads in video streams. But as long as ads are clickable it's ok as you said. But in the end they might add unclickable ads... maybe in 10 years :D  @sponsorblock I've been using YT for years, but I only just started using SponsorBlock about a year ago. Absolutely game changer. Just wanted to say thank you for all the devs/contributors hard work. Hope to keep using it of course as it makes YT tolerable to watch, but also I appreciate little updates like this, so thanks again and good luck fighting the good fight! @sponsorblock Ads suck and targeted advertising needs to DIAF, but honestly, if they are going to use ads, this is the way to do it, rather than forcing people to disable a vital piece of security software for today's internet.  @sponsorblock Hm, surely there's going to be metadata for where the ads are in order to make them unskippable in the player, right? @sponsorblock are the timestamps provided by the "copy video URL at this time" feature also broken? It would be surprising to see if YouTube broke that feature @eligrey they'll have some mangled code to do a conversion between the timestamps in there somewhere to do those things @sponsorblock Can Invidious/Freetube suffer from this or this happens only in the official web client? @LacyGreenfelder unknown, but there is a separate experiment they are running as of a few days ago which requires signing in to view videos which is affecting those frontends    @sponsorblock I somehow doubt this will be deployed on a wide scale. It's too constly for YouTube to live encode video for every single user. If I'm wrong I will probably just quit YouTube and go back to plain old TV shows and movies. @fell @sponsorblock Why would they encode for every single user? First, they already do some kind of chunking. Second, they can just create 5 versions of each video, each with different advertisment, and then serve those. Update popular videos from time to time...
 @fell@ma.fellr.net @sponsorblock@fosstodon.org I bet YouTube found a way to concat two videos without re-encoding everything.   @sponsorblock @fell @holsta it also costs a monthly subscription which sucks if you're poor @sponsorblock I wonder if they would keep the feature that lets you link a specific time in a video. @sponsorblock yknow, I'm a little surprised it's taken them this long to try that. YouTube Server-side ad injection FAQ https://gist.github.com/ajayyy/f7b1807e13731c25cef4c2c057d022bc#file-faq-md @sponsorblock I am not worried about ads. I am worried about downloading raw video from youtube. Now downloaded video would contain ads in between. Another one is if an extension replaces the ad with something better. That opens up a giant storm! We have to pause our viewing because of a 1950s erroneous revenue model combined with it's-still-the-90s charging models, right? What if the pause was filled in with Creative Commons entertaining material? ... @sponsorblock Youtube keeps spending money on a war they can't win. We will always find a way @sponsorblock A potential solution to this is to store not just a timecode on sponsorblock server, but a video-fingerprint (like store mean variance of group of pixels in like 5 random position, each 10 frame) sad to have to fight this... (they premium cost so much also, and they censor everything, not neutral...) @sponsorblock do you know if they're injecting ads within individual DASH segments or do they have the ad serving logic where they serve the DSAH metadata? |
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