I didnt even have to write me own script. I gave chatgpt a notepad with channel urls and just told it to write me code to load these urls one by one and download the
Last 2 videos. (Trust me you dont want to accidentally download a whole channel). Yt dlp can maintain a log of sort so videos aren't downloaded more then once.
I run this script on a schedule and delete the video when i am done with it. Nice and clean. I can also recommend trying to run an invididious instance for general video browsing but mine took some twiddling to setup right.
Like, my main issue with ads is all the tracking they do. If they add non-targeted ads to the video file I downloaded, whatever, I'll just fast forward through that part of the video.
The image doesn't quite work because youtube needs a MASSIVE solution that works, scales, doesn't fuck up their infrastructure and on and on and on.
Meanwhile on the user front, all your doing essentially is just skipping parts of a video, that will always be infinitely cheaper easier to do. Challenging for sure, but the solution can be small.
Even something as stupid as delaying your video start by 1 min, pre buffering then skipping ads. It's brute force and barbaric but the point is that Google can't do shit against that.
My ultimate vision is AI that preloads videos you want and detects ads / sponsor segments and just skips them / cuts them out on your device.
Another way to think about it... YouTube has huge amounts of compute resources, but per user it's an extremely small amount. Your phone has orders of magnitude more power to dedicate to you than YouTube does. Collectively, we have more processing power than YouTube.
I truly hope the new planet of the apes franchise is building to an actual planet of the apes remake. Time traveling astronauts and shattered statue of liberty. I feel like they're already sowing the seeds for human mutants living underground worshipping an unexploded atomic bomb. Man those movies were weird.
Is Google Chrome fighting uBlock country-specific? I use Chrome on Win 10 with uBlock and haven't seen a YouTube ad outside of the mobile app in ages. For me, uBlock never stopped working in Chrome and I watch YouTube videos every 1-2 days.
They have infinite resources. They're making gestures to dissuade normies. I suspect this will get them most of the result they want. They're also wasting time, effort and resources of adblock programmers (and that is a far more limited resource).
Sure but as long as there is a least one dedicated bearded dude hidden in a dark underground room behind his screen, they will be defeated. No matter how much they spent on the new technology. What I mean is that devs might burn out, they will still be replaced by others. And we get such people faster than youtube is able to burn them out
nah, if they embed the ad into the video stream (they were testing this for some users!), the only adblocking option will be to blank out the screen and wait through the ad (or download the video in advance and edit the ad out automatically), both of which would make it a lot more annoying to adblock than currently.
nope, the ad time varies unlike a sponsor segment, and also youtube would not let you skip through an ad while streaming it, whereas sponsors you can, hence the download and edit out with LLM or whatever algorithm works best
yes, but if youtube only serves you the real video chunks after your client plays through the ad chunks (all in the same media stream to the client), theres gonna be some waiting involved, not like adblocking today where it is instant.
you can skip through sponsor segments, but these are ads from youtube, not from the creator, and youtube will not let you conveniently skip through the ads. if implemented correctly, youtube could ensure that the ad is fully played, which would need downloading and automatic editing to counter.
How would they determine if the ad is played without trusting the client? I guess they could screw with the buffer, but that would really piss of people with poor internet, and most people would prefer an ad-length black screen to whatever attention wrenching dark pattern manipulative brown noise wants to infect your mind today.
That is an interesting question. From what I know, youtube has every video in chunks that they serve to the client, and so server side ad injection is just serving some ad chunks before the video. I think you're right with the buffer thing, it seems to me like the only way to make sure the client can't skip it would be to make the buffer shorter, impacting some people (although seems like only really people with internet thats fast enough for streaming some seconds, but not other seconds, which is an odd catagory)
Ultimately it would be a tradeoff for youtube, but the fact that they put the effort into doing mass testing of the idea at all shows that clearly there are some good incentives, and it may eventually be implemented.
Don't worry, I have been using the powerful technology of "the mute button" and "doing other stuff" since before cable TV existed. We always have alternatives.
This is actually one of very few valid cases for an LLM, to help sponsorblock determine ad segments by analyzing the word choice and speech patterns in segments of the video.
I guess you haven't heard they're experimenting with injecting ads right into the videos on the server. Just turning off scripts won't do anything for that.
Sponsor block gives me a nice list of options to do in that case: skip automatically, show a skip button or ignore. All based on what type of interruption there is.
Depending on your country, these ads still need to be marked clearly as such. And for accessibility reasons, that mark will always be machine readable.
It's times like these that online advertisements need to get creative to get ahead in this never ending adblocking arms race, just like the very subtle advertisement in the car chase scene in the Academy Award nominated film, "Barbie", now available on Blu-ray and select streaming services.
I know right? The other day I was drinking a coke and wondering about side effects of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, and it occurred to me that advertising could be a lot more creative and subtle.
