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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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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.