It’s more complicated, but you can still use crowd-sourcing to recognize the ads. Then use an algo to analyze the ad, frame by frame, and reject that when it shows up.

It’ll take a bit of time, but their strategy isn’t going to last. It’s ‘arms-race’ style escalation on a digital front. Eventually, the crowd sourcing will be replaced by AI/ML tools. Ad companies, like google, will always try to fight back, but open-source will always respond.

You can’t beat nerds that are skilled and passionate about not getting fucked.

Go to your favorite YT creator's channels and download important content! Educational content, lectures, nostalgic content. Anything and everything you have the storage for.

One day, it will be locked away behind paywalls, poisoned with ads, or just deleted entirely.

Part of preparing for war is stockpiling supplies. Buy bulk storage. An extra 2-4 TB hard drive can be bought for 100-200 dollars. It doesn't have to be fancy, get a friend or two to go in with you on it.

Download and save everything you value. Rip your physical media and save it, pirate the shows and movies you love. One day it will be locked away or stolen from you because the terms of service changed.

Please don't delay, I wish I had started years ago myself.

Suits me. I have a ton of movies and TV shows to catch up to.

Shit guess I have to quit yt and move to peer tube full time.

Friends, for now, my suggestion to you is to use privacy-friendly alternative frontends instead of the official Youtube client.

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube

It was only a matter of time before Google put their foot down and insisted that you can't have a good experience on YouTube. Its time is coming.

If it's part of the video now, doesn't that mean we can just fast forward through it?

Because if it's something explicit in the stream, then ad blockers will just look for that and we're back to where we are currently.

I have said this in another post here, as a joke, that YT can just inject the ads in the main video stream, and it would be just like cable tv where you can't skip the ad.

I swear it was a joke.

edit: spelling

Adblockers can still mute and stop the user from seeing the ads with black screen (or fast forward). Advertisers will still be mad.

Yes ik they disable the video controls but the video is still served just like before, just that they inject ads into it.

I've got a couple questions about this.

If the timestamp is off, how does the share link with timestamp work?

If I quit watching the video when an ad starts and then start watching it again, does it continue with the ad? I watch yt on my Samsung tv and it's an ad minefield, but it's kinda fun and easy to report the ads or quit the vid and start it again to avoid the ads. Id rather spend 30 seconds bouncing around menus than watching ads for stuff I don't use.

If it's injected video, can I just skip ahead like I do for sponsored content?

I guess no more ad-free experience in privacy-respecting clients. Well that sucks but let's hope it at least won't kill them completely

Oh no, please no.

Will uBlock still work or will that also break when/if this gets added?

yt-dlp installs now: 📈📈📈

Are the ads injected in real-time or at the start of the video?

I assume it uses extra processing power to add them randomly for each user individually so if it was the latter would rapidly refreshing the page over and over again force them to completely rerun the process over again and slow their servers down? I guess I'm not entirely sure how this would work.

I WILL BURN THE GOOGLEPLEX TO THE FUCKING GROUND!