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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Because those can also be skipped. They are required by law to label sections of ads. This labeling can be read to figure out how long the ads are and thus be skipped. That's how twitch ads are blocked.
Then how hard would it be to use some pattern-based image recognition to detect this label? Not very hard, I have a friend that does something similar at work.
You're doubting the ease of implementation, but it's really not hard. It'll have to be a fairly predictable pattern from YouTube's side, which is one of the easiest to accurately detect.
Nevermind that though, it'll never be embebbed in the video stream, because it has to be accessible as well as readable. It's impossible to guarantee it to be readable without actually rendering the text in whatever client it's being viewed in. Imagine a 240p video, the text would have to take up half the screen to be readable with that low resolution.
If they did that then they'd have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.
Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like "naw, let's not do that".
I didn't mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.
Even if the page isn't giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT's servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they'd need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn't been already inserted into the video.
I could be completely wrong tho, I don't work at YouTube and haven't built a video sharing site before.
Thanks for the breakdown and the link, cool to learn about the new (well new to me) tech, sad to see it's gonna probably bit us in the butt at somepoint.