this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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YouTube has been spotted testing server-side ads, which could pose a problem to ad blockers.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not necessarily. They could split the video in advance, assuming the ads will always be at the same point. Even if not, they could still use the direct, unaltered source with a range. The big challenge would be keeping it all synced, which I think is safe to say that they will get right.

But even if it did need to be transcoded, YouTube automatically transcodes every single video uploaded, multiple times. They are clearly not afraid of it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If you’ve ever used yt-dl, you’ll know that YT vids are all split into multiple files. Presumably, this is where the ads get injected.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No, they're not split. Each one of those results you get from yt-dlp is a different version of the same video. I.e. different resolutions, different codecs. Some of them are the audio, some of them are the video, but they're not split.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

They are also that. But when you watch YouTube-dl download a video, it downloads several parts, then ffmpeg recombines them into a single output file.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That may be to speed up the download using multiple connections. Other downloaders do it on other sites as well, doesn't mean the files are split on the server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I mean, you can sit here and make up a bunch of different reasons, but the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.