this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
607 points (96.5% liked)

Technology

59390 readers
3907 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They’re testing to embed the ads in the stream and not the usual switch to a different video

It definitely affects third party client if now they get a file of a video that now has 30 seconds of ad content at the beginning

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

it won't though, because you can just remove that 30 seconds at the beginning, which is almost definitely going to be very different than the rest of the video in a number of ways. Notably, there are likely going to be UI differences during and after ads play, as well as video playback alterations. Ad's aren't going to be the same quality as video itself.

It's possible that they're transcoding them into the video itself, but doing that would be catastrophically bad and have such a massive cost that it simply would not be worthwhile.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

They are transcoding them into the video. Sponsorblock had to make a quick change to discard submissions from users that have been identified to be on this trial system, because it affects the video length, and as such - makes it impossible to have consistent segments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

i highly doubt it. I would think they're probably doing some UDP packet voodoo bullshit.

Though it likely appears as transcoded.

The sheer cost of them being transcoded into videos is immense, even if they're live encoding every video.

What happens when you get an ad you need to takedown and remove? You're on disk transcode is suddenly useless now, and you need to make a new one, easy enough, you can just do that in the background, but this also means your ads are baked into each video, which is less than ideal, unless you're constantly updating them.

And if you're doing live transcodes, that means that you have to do this for every view on every video, and i'm not sure that's sustainable.

I suppose you could probably do a cached live transcode system to bring down the overhead, but i can't imagine it's easier than just pulling some voodoo networking bullshit to literally inject an advertisement.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

AFAIK there is no need to re-encode, since Youtube videos are stored and served in chunks anyways. The change is that they are now slipping in the ad chunks as if they were a part of the normal video chunk stream.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

yeah that's what im saying. Re-encoding and transcoding is completely different, it's more than likely a served change, rather than a stored change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

We can just train an AI to filter out the spam , just like we did with email.