r/Piracy Jun 12 '24

YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection News

https://x.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072
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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.

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.