111–120 of 242 posts
"Have you ever tried to download videos from YouTube? I mean manually without relying on software like youtube-dl, yt-dlp or one of "these" websites. It's much more complicated than you might think." This reminds me of some sort of fizzbuzz test. This is not complicated at all. There is no need to use the Range header or run Javascript. The short script below does not download anything because there is no need. It do…
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Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms. They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later. Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.
splicing video is pretty easy - there are certain points - key frames - where video streams can be spliced with nearly zero computational overhead, no loss of quality, no loading delay, etc.
I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos).
It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the edge.
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Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms. They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later. Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.
Very surprised they haven't started this long ago. One might suspect the problem is ad play and click accounting. Anyway, when they start delivering ads in-band, the next step for blockers is to identify that first keyframe in the player by using a pool of shared signatures, right? So then player clients will need adblock plugins which will have a sizeable signature distribution infra and grief for clients. Then the…
AI controlled adblocker is the end game!
Not trying to be a sketchy contrarian, but why would you do this with JavaScript? It just doesn't seem very fit for purpose...
Especially in an article that already had to unwind and explain Youtube's Javascript code.
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I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time. You are utilizing more bandwidth but you go away earlier. I think the original browser use case is tuned for the common occurrence of not watching the whole video. But if you intend to watch (and archive) the whole video to begin with then I don't think this eats away Google's bandwidth more. OTOH it pr…
Well, you go away unless you're another organization that proposes to mirror all of YouTube and eat its lunch. Google can't only think about humans, it's got to also think about competing organizations. That complicates things.
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Well, you go away unless you're another organization that proposes to mirror all of YouTube and eat its lunch. Google can't only think about humans, it's got to also think about competing organizations. That complicates things.
that's their problem to deal with. why is everyone here going all 'think of the poor corporations'
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I would totally buy Premium subscription if they let me download the videos, and I told Google that. The way it is now - no deal.
Meh, Google know that nobody would pay for that as a selling point when it only applied to a third of videos, and they will never get copyright clearance from third parties for more than that.
On a sidenote am I imagining things or do videos actually look a tiny bit better in YouTube? This really has puzzled me. I downloaded a few favourites and watch them on VLC or Infuse on my AppleTV. In the YouTube app I can use the "nerd stats" to confirm I am viewing the exact same video/audio streams... ... it could be my imagination but it seems like YouTube does a really subtle kind of filter that makes the "block…
I can answer about the audio. YouTube (and most other streaming sites like Spotify etc) use something called ReplayGain. It's essentially a tag that specifies the calculated average loudness of the video/song/whatever (this number is calculated at upload time). Upon playback, the official YT client knows to use that tag and adjust its volume level accordingly, but I'd imagine either the tag isn't getting downloaded,…
Volume / Normalized 100% / 100% (content loudness -0.2dB)
On a sidenote am I imagining things or do videos actually look a tiny bit better in YouTube? This really has puzzled me. I downloaded a few favourites and watch them on VLC or Infuse on my AppleTV. In the YouTube app I can use the "nerd stats" to confirm I am viewing the exact same video/audio streams... ... it could be my imagination but it seems like YouTube does a really subtle kind of filter that makes the "block…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very surprised they haven't started this long ago. One might suspect the problem is ad play and click accounting. Anyway, when they start delivering ads in-band, the next step for blockers is to identify that first keyframe in the player by using a pool of shared signatures, right? So then player clients will need adblock plugins which will have a sizeable signature distribution infra and grief for clients. Then the…
> Ad infinitum? AI controlled adblocker is the end game!