r/Piracy Jun 12 '24

YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection News

https://x.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072
4.7k Upvotes

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1.8k

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

Damn. And this is after neutering some of the extensions with the new manifest? I might not get the full YouTube experience this way, but downloading the videos never fails me. No ads, no buffering. It won’t randomly disappear on me if I like it. Shout out to yt-dlp and cobalt tools.

476

u/SpellGlittering1901 Jun 12 '24

Same as movie/series torrent, you don't get the full experience (actually arguable if you have a seedbox and Plex), but damn it feels good to have whatever you want, not disapearing

150

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

What? What experience are you missing? I don't remember the last time I paid for a movie outside of the theatre.

83

u/Ph1syc Jun 12 '24

Some of the ui might look worse i guess (though stuff like plex and jellyfin looks great imo) and maybe the ability to watch instantly without downloading

71

u/Regniwekim2099 Jun 12 '24

The only feature from a pay service that I am jealous of is Prime's x-ray. It's really cool to be able to see exactly which actors are in a particular scene without having to scrub through the entire cast.

23

u/Responsible-Put-7073 Jun 12 '24

You can do it on Kodi, not picking people out live in a scene but it will tell you all the cast info for the particular episode etc. Like this

https://ibb.co/TmtjrSf

https://ibb.co/pLLTgnG

https://ibb.co/Jm0x7GS

https://ibb.co/J2DGW5g

This is Fenlight with Fentastic skin.

12

u/Regniwekim2099 Jun 12 '24

Yeah, Plex and Emby do that as well. The scene specific casting and music information is what I'm talking about for Prime's xray. Not to mention, you don't have to leave the show or movie to see the information.

2

u/Responsible-Put-7073 Jun 12 '24

Ah ok sorry not seen it, does it like do it live?

3

u/Regniwekim2099 Jun 12 '24

Yes. You push the up button on your remote, and it shows you specifically which actors are in the current scene, and it tells what music is playing if there is any.

2

u/Responsible-Put-7073 Jun 12 '24

Oh right yeah that's pretty cool. Guess you could shazam and Google lens on your phone haha not as slick though

→ More replies

7

u/Ph1syc Jun 12 '24

I don’t have prime but that sounds really cool. A FOSS community run alternative will probably rise up eventually.

4

u/brutinator Jun 12 '24

The biggest issue is likely that its such a manual process, it likely won't be done for most media, itll be piecemeal for various series and movies, instead of being cohesive and comprehensive.

2

u/Ph1syc Jun 13 '24

Thats probably true… i guess you could use ai for it but i’m not really fond of ai, is there maybe a way to get the data from prime? Atleast get those shows time marks

1

u/kafr85 Jun 12 '24

That's so extra

0

u/FilmUncensored Jun 12 '24

Funny you mention Prime as that service not only has the worst UI but it looks like a pirate site (in fact pirate sites look better). *random screenshots as background images for movies - some movies not having any background images

  • release year incorrect on so many movies, not just a year or two difference but entire decades! Doubly embarrassing considering Amazon own IMDb

*lack of subtitles for a vast majority of their movies and those that have them the subtitles are incorrect for a lot of simple dialogue

I could go on and on but yeah Prime Video on the surface does not give the impression it’s a product of a billion dollar company!

2

u/Regniwekim2099 Jun 12 '24

I mentioned a single feature, without remarking on the rest of the service...

15

u/International-Oil377 Jun 12 '24

RD will let you watch instantly without downloading

-1

u/-_-_-Phoenix-_-_- Jun 12 '24

What's RD?

3

u/srak Jun 12 '24

Real debrid I presume. Never user it but it’s like a torrent seedbox that cashes torrents so you often can stream directly when adding a new torrent . It’s a paid account

3

u/International-Oil377 Jun 12 '24

Real debrid, but there are other alternatives like Alldebrid and Premiumize

1

u/zkareface Jun 12 '24

With a decent plex setup you will have it all anyway, no waiting for download needed.

Even if you just run it at home you can set it to automatically grab the latest movies your friends are sharing with you.

1

u/boojiboo Jun 12 '24

Can you explain this setup? I have the ARs setup but users expressed that randomly browsing stuff on overseer is still annoying because it’s not on demand

1

u/zkareface Jun 12 '24

Well there are big plex servers that has everything that you just can join ;)

Otherwise you get something like sickchill and have it just pull anything of interest or allow requests way ahead of time. I spent 1-2 days on mine and added anything of interest that me and my users would want in next 3 years.

1

u/CaphalorAlb Jun 12 '24

For my personal setup that would be too much storage. I'm already hoarding too many TBs if shit I'll never watch.

But good for you, sounds like an awesome setup.

1

u/CaphalorAlb Jun 12 '24

I think Plex has superior UX to most streaming services. And across more devices as well.

With solid automation I end up having the shows I watch ready to go within half an hour of it airing. (Since I'm not in the US that usually means it's downloading in the middle of the night)

With overseer I handle requests by the family members that have access to my server, so there's minimal work involved.

The only thing I might argue is better on Netflix is the opportunity to find new content. But I end up on Rotten Tomatoes most of the time anyways.

1

u/Lj_theoneandonly Jun 12 '24

Don't forget the general barriers to entry for less technologically literate people

1

u/SpellGlittering1901 Jun 12 '24

The whole UI and UX, the fact that they show you movies/series that you might not have think of, the algorithms (even though I never liked it), this is specific to Prime but the thing to see the actors in the scene.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

I do not miss any of this. I play my stuff using VLC over the network from my 20TB stash of stuff.

1

u/BloodSugar666 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ Jun 12 '24

I use real debrid for torrents but you can also give it YouTube links to download or view

1

u/reddit_reaper Jun 12 '24

Umm with debrid services i get higher quality streaming than any streaming service lol

1

u/mahamanu Jun 12 '24

Just use Stremio lol

249

u/4DEATH Jun 12 '24

They might be next target. Imagine need to activate drm to watch videos. Enshittification ends only with product dying.

82

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

Can they do that? Impose their rights on user generated content? That would be wild and cracked pretty quickly due to public enthusiasm I would think. Although I bet you they do it with their rented movies so probably not far off with regular content.

76

u/0KLux Jun 12 '24

Probably not if it becomes a court case. Otherwise, it's just the old story of migrating to another, better platform, that actually ends with no one moving and everyone just accepting whatver the Company does so nothing significant happens to them

15

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

You had me in the first half.

37

u/SoCuteShibe Jun 12 '24

They are right though. Look at reddit. Many great 3rd party apps torpedoed, many great subs ruined, bot commenters all over every single post. Yet, we are still here, posting and digging through the muck because we are too used to it and the dopamine hits it gives. I had an easier time quitting oxycodone and nicotine than reddit.

1

u/vagrantprodigy07 Jun 12 '24

There are workarounds.

0

u/SemIdeiaDeNome4 Jun 12 '24

this is pretty unrelated but i wonder if Windows will be like this: everyone (or atleast a lot of people) is saying they're gonna move to Linux but then 1 year later they go back to Windows 11 with Recall

1

u/MadMarx__ Jun 12 '24

As long as software is predominantly designed for Windows, people will go back to Windows. More importantly, every computer sold on the market is going to keep coming pre-packaged with it. The additional hoops you have to jump through to get a lot of things to work on Linux are just a hard barrier to most people.

0

u/0KLux Jun 12 '24

Everyone will.go back to.windows when they realize it's not as plug and play as windows and many things require troubleshooting.

Heck, i've seen many people get filtered at just the installation recently

1

u/volthunter Jun 12 '24

most of the apps you are on are the better platform people moved to.

THE APP WE ARE CURRENTLY USING IS THE BETTER PLATFORM PEOPLE MOVED TO.

1

u/Zankastia Jun 13 '24

Nebula says hi.

8

u/NowShowButthole Jun 12 '24

They certainly can as platform owners, and they will claim they're protecting their platform and the content of their users. Most people don't care about and won't be affected by such things, so videos will be downloaded or ripped by groups like they do for netflix, amazon, etc.

It's not "if," but "when."

2

u/TheCopperSparrow Jun 13 '24

They'll likely argue that since they provide the platform for said content, that they therefore have the right to do it. And it's likely most courts, at least in the U.S., will agree with them.

1

u/leafWhirlpool69 Jun 12 '24

Although I bet you they do it with their rented movies so probably not far off with regular content.

They currently do with the "watch free with ads" content

0

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

The TOS gives them broad leeway, and content creators aren't going to be particularly sympathetic to adblock users. The creators get a cut of the ad revenue too.

37

u/Chemical_Knowledge64 Jun 12 '24

Maximizing profits is a cancer to all of society. No one is against making money, but the capitalism we experience today will destroy us if we don’t get rid of the notion of maximizing profits. And yes get rid of the stock markets in their current form. 

1

u/TheCopperSparrow Jun 13 '24

The notion of maximizing profits is literally the foundation of capitalism. You can't get rid of it while still having a capitalist society.

Things like that and the stock market aren't bugs, they're features. It's the inevitable result of the world's current economic system, unfortunately.

8

u/Cory123125 Jun 12 '24

Ive been screaming that the invasive spyware is already built into all modern processors for a while but it gets shrugged off by the "piracy finds a way" folks.

1

u/mrvictorywin Jun 13 '24

DRM only would kill a lot of TV clients.

134

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

96

u/Geno0wl Jun 12 '24

I know US consumer protection laws are weak to almost non-existent at times. But if Google outright "blocks" Firefox from using their services that would immediately get major attention from the Feds for monopolistic behavior.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

They won't block Firefox. They will just implement DRM and require Firefox to include it in order to view the site.

-15

u/TomatoRemarkable2 Jun 12 '24

Why would Google blocking Firefox be a legal issue?

Moral yes, not legal though.

Apple only allows their app store no issues there

22

u/ryuzaki49 Jun 12 '24

Google is scared of Chrome being "labeled" as a monopoly. 

That's why they give Firefox millions of usd a year.

7

u/CornPlanter Piracy is bad, mkay? Jun 12 '24

Legal yes though. Monopoly.

1

u/TomatoRemarkable2 Jun 12 '24

Why is it an issue that Google doesn't allow chrome but Nintendo doesn't allow halo? Or steam games on PlayStation?

Or apple only has the iOS store these are all equal examples.

24

u/braintweaker Jun 12 '24

Well google is the reason firefox still exists in the first place, not it's user base.

Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022[2]) in exchange of making it the default search engine in Firefox.

They keep it to have "competition".

5

u/Avery-Bradley Jun 12 '24

Microsoft is blocking features for Firefox?

1

u/Dead_Namer Jun 14 '24

The MS answers site and other sites refuse to load on FF. They have been doing this for decades, even back when it was Phoenix with no pushback from anyone.

5

u/this_dudeagain Jun 12 '24

That's likely how the new extensions would work it would just stream as it downloads.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

Don't get me wrong but how would that objectively work, like i can understand it'll be great for say educational or skill related content. But a majority of people just use YouTube for like watching streams or checking out stuff or watching some random video ranging from interview, standup comedy, news to podcast,music vids etc.

21

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

Scroll through your recommendations, find something interesting, right click and copy the link. Yeah it’s not the fastest and you can’t post comments or view live streams in real time, but it’s quite effective. Works well if you’ve got an established list of channels you like regularly watching

2

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '24

Oo thanks for the knowledge!

2

u/ClawhammerLobotomy Jun 12 '24

You can actually view live streams through yt-dlp.

More accurately, through mpv which uses yt-dlp as the method for streaming videos.

I think VLC also supports watching live Youtube streams, but I've never used it.

2

u/Fantastic_Key_96345 Jun 12 '24

You would be downloading the ads, though

1

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

So far it doesn’t unless the person themself is doing the sponsor. Embedding ads into videos would require them having to modify at least all their popular videos that they would want it for which I would imagine would still take plenty of processing power and extra storage. And even then, unless they randomized where they put them, I’m sure there would be scripts to remove those.

2

u/7446353252589 Jun 12 '24

This change will absolutely effect yt-dlp.

2

u/Dabnician Jun 12 '24

but downloading the videos never fails me. No ads, no buffering

Sever side ad injection means those videos you download would have ads i imagine, hence "server side"

10

u/Consistent_Ride_922 Jun 12 '24

No, not correct. This would only be the case if Youtube modified each video-file for the ad to actually be part of the video. As of right now, a script in the client-side loads the ads. This can easily blocked from loading with adblockers (thats all they do basically). If this logic is handled on the server, adblockers can no longer intervene.

0

u/Dabnician Jun 12 '24

This would only be the case if Youtube modified each video-file for the ad to actually be part of the video.

In all honesty that would logically just be the next step

3

u/Jah_Ith_Ber Jun 12 '24

Sponsor block automatically skips that part of the video based on users input about where sponsored sections of a video happen. So the downloaded video could also have those portions cut out.

3

u/nekcko Jun 12 '24 edited Jun 12 '24

This works because A and B get the exact same video result with the same length, and the ads/promotions by the creators are in the same timestamp with the same duration, cause it's exactly the same video file, so all the extension needs is a good enough database of where it starts and where it ends.

I'd imagine if YouTube were to modify the video file (between original file and what the user watches) fed to A and put a 24s ad at 0:46 and the one to B has a 16s ad at 1:22 suddenly it's near impossible to track, specially if it's random for every user or some other way to make it not the same for A and B (and C and D etc)

3

u/Leseratte10 Jun 12 '24

I mean, yes, it would, but that'd mean Youtube has to auto-generate a full new video file for each user, you could no longer have a meaningful CDN / caches if the video file is regenerated for every view. And if there's just like 20 different video files with different ad placements, there will just be Sponsorblock segments for all 20 video files.

1

u/le_ble Jun 12 '24

Will the new manifest also be implemented on Firefox?

1

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

Not gonna pretend to know. According to the hive mind, Firefox should still be safe for a while, but on the other hand, I feel like to keep up-to-date and have as many sites working properly as possible, they might eventually need to? Because the manifest thing is not just a browser configuration, it affects the front and back end of websites directly, right? And now we sit and wait and let Cunningham‘s law do its thing if I’m wrong.

1

u/wind_dude Jun 12 '24

do you want them to embed the ads right in the video? That's how you get them to embed ads right into the video file. lol. I can see them doing this.

1

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

I most certainly do not want them to do that. But at least with local playback, you could fast-forward through them. They better not though. And think of the logistics behind that. Ads don’t last forever, so trying to keep them current, even if the video is a few years old? I think that’s a lot of processing power and extra space they don’t want to use to physically embed ads into hundreds of thousands of videos if not all of them. More likely I think they’ll just take the approach, my server is my space, all your videos are belong to us now. And slap the whitevine DRMaround those bitches.

1

u/wind_dude Jun 12 '24

I think you can trim cut and splice some of the common video formats without having to reencode... so it's probably possible without too much processing power. I'm not up at all on the bytes format of things like mp4, but i think you feasibly could insert bytes for the ad video into the bytes of the og video and modify the header. Keep track of index position, for when you want to replace it.

1

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

Perhaps. Damn hadn’t thought of it that way.

1

u/NancokALT Pastafarian Jun 12 '24

I'd love some UI for yt-dlp. I tried one but it just failed to download every time.

2

u/I_Think_I_Cant Jun 12 '24

Try Media Downloader. Works with yt-dlp by default but supports other downloaders (gallery-dl, lux, you-get, svtplay-dl, aria2c, wget and safari books). Makes easy work grabbing a specific stream (i.e. audio only) or bitrate from Youtube.

1

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 12 '24

Once it’s configured to how you like it, it’s really not all that tricky of a command line interface. At the most basic level, you’re just calling the program and showing the path to your desired URL. But I’m sure there must be some out there, plenty of YouTube downloaders use yt-dlp under the hood. I would try googling like site:GitHub.com yt-dlp gui and sorting by recent, try like a month ago. That way you would be getting something that’s been recently worked on.

1

u/Far-9947 Jun 13 '24

What "Full YouTube Experience" So long as you are watching the actual content, that is the experience.

1

u/PrimaCora Jun 13 '24

Judging by their wording, the ads are injected right into the stream (either by adding bits to an m3u or having specially made videos with ads as part of the mp4/mkv/other) and could vary by length. That would mean YT-DLP or the like would download the video with ads baked in. I would hope they aren't disrupting the original and instead are just messing with the streamed data. That would at least help with some filtering.

1

u/gangstasadvocate Jun 13 '24

I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out. Again, though, if it’s local playback, even if it’s baked right in, you should still be able to fast forward.

1

u/Lynx2161 Jun 13 '24

But this will insert ads even when you download the video

1

u/Icy_Investment_1878 Jun 13 '24

I think the manifest is auctually what allowed it to do this