To get rid of the annoying YouTube message (ad blocker are not allowed on Youtube) use this custom filter in uBlock extension
- Open uBlock extension dashboard
- Open my filters tab
- Copy & Paste this code into my filter
- Apply changes and close all tabs
via: enderman
They’re going to randomize all vars and function names, mark my words.
Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
“I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.”
Who is going to tell him?
aren’t they already? It’s been some time since I worked in video. but I remember HLS manifest had ad insertion built-in.
Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don’t work for YouTube video ads.
If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that’s not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
You don’t need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.
Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn’t matter). The browser first fetches a “playlist” which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.
If the browser itself could check those fragments though… 🤔
Yeah they are sooner or later going to do something like this. But then we can download videos and use Ai to remove the ads.
Will probably pop up YouTube proxys that does this on request so we don’t even have to download.
They are legally obligated to show which part of the video is an ad (and contractually obligated to have a clickable link), which always leaves ad blockers a way to correlate and remove those segments though (essentially skipping forward during the ad, then lying to the backend when asking for additional segments as if the user had skipped through the video after the ad was over).
On Twitch they managed to outplay even uBlock, because the streaming is realtime and if you skip the ad segments, there’s no data to fall back to and the backend won’t send you the regular segments until the ad break is over (from what I understand). So at best you get a waiting screen instead of an ad.
However I’m not sure if it would make (financial) sense to apply a similar strategy on YouTube, as that would require preventing buffering the video until the ads have stopped playing (and wouldn’t work at all for midroll ads since the video has already been buffered at that point). Not only would this be expensive to do in the backend, but it would likely cause disproportionate buffering on low-end connections which couldn’t start loading the video while the ad is playing.
it will be an interesting cat and mouse game or people will start to shift to another video sharing platform
Of course they are, for example when targeting HTML elements you generally need to target text not vars or function names.
At the end it will be always blockage in someway since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar… So there will be always a way… But yeah it can get more.complex.
deleted by creator
The point being that if one can find the domain through which they push said script/the script itself, they can disable it (I use NoScript).