YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#111

Post by spyder » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 4:32 AM UTC

imaginenore wrote: post #57

milankragujevic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't break any laws since I don't play any videos which have forbidden embedding. Plus, technology like that has been mainstream in VLC, youtube-dl, etc, for ages. It uses the official YouTube API, and respects mosts of the Terms of Service, except the video fetching, which doesn't use the API at all, just loads the page on the server and catches the video stream.

Embedding and scraping into a video tag aren't the same thing. As soon as you store any of their content on your server, even if in just RAM, you're fucked, because that's copyright infringement.

> you're fucked, because that's copyright infringement.

Tell this to the hundreds of online youtube downloaders which are downloading youtube videos to their servers and then making it available for the user to download it from them: https://www.google.hu/search?q=online+youtube+downloader

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#112

Post by eva1984 » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 4:38 AM UTC

kentonv wrote: post #110

eva1984 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blocker for now is free. Disclaimer: I have Youtube Red

Yes but presumably no one sane thinks Google is morally obliged to serve us videos for free?

No Google should adapt and move on, ad blockers are here to stay forever, says some people.

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#113

Post by inefficient » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:10 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #94

denim_chicken wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably watch 95% fewer YouTube videos if I actually had to pay money for them.

As a Red subscriber, I can tell you that the opposite is probably true. When there's no longer any risk of being annoyed by unskippable ads, you tend to click on a lot more video links (and waste a lot more time.) YT Red is worth it IMHO.

Exactly this. I got some free time with youtube red when I got a nexus 6p. In spite of already having spotify, I purchased some more google play music all access (which includes Red) simply to keep the ad-free youtube.

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#114

Post by kentonv » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:18 AM UTC

eva1984 wrote: post #112

kentonv wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but presumably no one sane thinks Google is morally obliged to serve us videos for free?

No Google should adapt and move on, ad blockers are here to stay forever, says some people.

What adaption to you suggest other than giving people the opportunity to pay directly, as YouTube Red does?

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#115

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:40 AM UTC

meritt wrote: post #70

YouTube is free. It's free because Google pays for it via ads. If you aren't watching ads, then you're effectively not paying for the content. Exactly what are people expecting to happen and why are they mad at Google here? Why do they feel like they're owed something for nothing? If you don't like it, go launch and finance your own free-to-watch-no-ads-included video site.

It's awfully ironic, IMO. We believe everyone else's information wants to be free- but MY information, oh my information wants to be strongly encrypted and inaccessible even to the courts.

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#116

Post by rdl » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 5:55 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #94

denim_chicken wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would probably watch 95% fewer YouTube videos if I actually had to pay money for them.

As a Red subscriber, I can tell you that the opposite is probably true. When there's no longer any risk of being annoyed by unskippable ads, you tend to click on a lot more video links (and waste a lot more time.) YT Red is worth it IMHO.

There are ways to get it for $5/mo. I can't believe people don't do that if they watch more than a few hours/month of youtube.

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#117

Post by ZachSaucier » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 6:06 AM UTC

SimeVidas wrote: post #74

Haven’t looked into it, but this looks like an unintentional technical error. Google tends to optimize their websites for Chrome, so other browsers like Firefox have to deal with issues like this, regularly.

It is occurring on FF as well: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=149245#p149245

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#118

Post by hidroto » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 6:12 AM UTC

ghrifter wrote: post #33

JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

Alternative hypothesis (assuming a bug rather than intended behavior): YouTube is testing a new ad mechanism, and the new mechanism (rather naturally) wasn't tested on systems blocking ads; it then produces a delay if the ad can't be downloaded, rather than silently skipping it. But yeah, I do tend to watch most of my videos through youtube-dl these days, even though the HTML5 player works fine for me in Firefox with…

> videos through youtube-dl these days how do you find the video you want without using youtube? do you just use the youtube search interface then download the video by copying the url (w/o even clicking on the link to start the video buffer)

i just have rss feeds of the accounts i have subscribed to in my feedreader.

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#119

Post by FranOntanaya » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 6:56 AM UTC

MichaelBurge wrote: post #26

I've been amazed that adblockers work on videos since I started using them. It seems like it wouldn't be much trouble at all to simply embed the ad in the video stream. It does let people skip past the ad, but I'm not sure how important that is. If they start doing that, you could do the heavy-handed approach of re-encoding the video to show the ad(or a spot for the ad to be filled in by the server) side-by-side and…

Transcoding all those videos every time the ads need to change or to target every audience sounds nightmarish. It'd make sense for the most popular videos, but the long tail would definitely remain with sidecar ads.

Re: YouTube now shows "An error has occurred" while ads running

#120

Post by hysan » Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 7:34 AM UTC

meritt wrote: post #70

YouTube is free. It's free because Google pays for it via ads. If you aren't watching ads, then you're effectively not paying for the content. Exactly what are people expecting to happen and why are they mad at Google here? Why do they feel like they're owed something for nothing? If you don't like it, go launch and finance your own free-to-watch-no-ads-included video site.

Incorrect. It's free because Google pays for it by:

- tracking users both on YouTube and outside of it

- then using the collected data to sell more targeted ads

If it were just ads, then far fewer people would care about watching them (at least in the HN demographic). So if you are going to use this argument, please use it correctly.