this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
620 points (98.4% liked)

Technology

58142 readers
4294 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
  • YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
  • This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
  • The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Other ramifications aside, it wouldn’t be that costly to splice real time.

YouTube has standard profiles of video and audio quality levels. As long as the video stream is the same quality, the stream can basically be concatenated one after another without any meaningful over head. Try it: ffmpeg -f concat -i files.list -c copy output.mp4 for two files with same codec (audio and video) was processed at over 900x speed for me with just CPU.

So all YouTube would need to do is transcode the ads they’d intend to splice in into the standard formats they’d offer the stream at (which they’d already have the video transcoded into), and splice the ads they’d want to show in realtime at request time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yes, it is doable. But it also implies keeping track of individual sessions, to make sure you serve the right ad at the right time to the right people. Nothing impossible, but definitely more work to do per individual player, and on the scale of youtube this is quite a lot.