this one? https://gist.github.com/BrockA/2625891

Can you have it replace the video screen portion with cat videos from another source during the unskippable part?

I'm pretty sure ads will likely be different audio level or light level that would be detectable. If there is no option to detect the ad via API that would be one way to know when the ads begin and end.

Drink the Kool-aid instead and join Premium. It's great. YouTube is my primary source of video entertainment. No ads on any device and countless thousands of hours of math and science videos, SNL clips, educational videos, game reviews, and on and on.

For the cost of two beers a month, I get access to the best video library in the world with no ads, plus saved video progress so you can resume videos later, and YouTube Music to boot.

Why everyone on Lemmy thinks everything in the world should be free when it costs money to run the servers and pay content creators is beyond me. Makes no sense.

I pay for YouTube Premium. I get a lot of value from it, and streaming video isn’t cheap. I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to think they should provide it for free.

The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don't want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.

People make up this fantaasy land where art should be done with no compensation to be pure. Which ignores that the vast majority of art in human history was either made by the independently wealthy or as a "patron" system where... an independently wealthy person paid an artist to make them look good.

And that even extends to the modern day. People get angry about "nepo babies" but... it takes a lot of time and money to refine your music to a meaningful degree. The garage bands that get discovered playing at a local bar are VERY much the exception and almost everyone universally considers their best albums to be the first couple after they got signed by a label and could drill down and refine it.

Youtube and the like are basically the first time that "the everyperson" could make art for a living. Unfortunately... that means they need to get paid. Ads are of very questionable use. Youtube Premium is almost universally praised by any creator who is willing to talk about it. But we need some way of paying those mid tier creators who are popular enough to do it for a living but not popular enough to get 120 bucks a year from their fans to upload MAYBE one video (looking at you Michael Reeves).

I used to whitelist yt on my ad block because a I know portion of it goes to the creators. Then yt took advantage of me by adding more and more intrusive ads. Now I support creators directly whenever I can.

(I think that's their goal, either ads or no watch)

It might take a lot more effort, but I don't think this will be the end. Google is required by law to label ads as such, giving these tools an opportunity to detect and skip them.

It's quite likely that the cost actually outweighs the gains. Adblocking really isn't all that prevalent across Internet users as a whole. I think the stats are something like 10% or lower.

It's costly; either you prepare encodes ahead of time with different ads and serve that appropriately, or you splice ads live for each request, which is also costly in resources. You can't get away with just a few variation; ads are usually targeted. It also come with other issues, like, it is mandatory in a lot of place to clearly identify ads, so there should be an obvious marker somewhere. If it's in the UI, it can be detected and replaced live by a video of kittens for the duration of the ad, so I suppose they also have to handle any signal in the video… (It's speculation, I didn't get any of these yet).

I'm curious to see if this will hold, and how we will run around it in the long run.

I’ll just use I and stop using YouTube. I won’t purposefully poison my mind with ads.

Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it's the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I'll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there's something better I should be doing.

Nah, it would be very hard. Presumably this only works if they can insert ads on the fly so they can cycle ads based on region and time. Static ads on videos would have been easy to do and easy to bypass.

If you don't know how many ads there are or what they look like or how long they are it becomes very hard to do timeline nonsense to avoid them. It also seems like it'd be expensive to do at the scale Youtube needs it, but maybe they figured it out. That would suck. We'll see, I suppose.