Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don't work for YouTube video ads.

If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that's not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.

[–] cozycosmic@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You don't need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.

Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn't matter). The browser first fetches a "playlist" which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.

[–] pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.cafe 2 points 2 years ago

If the browser itself could check those fragments though... 🤔

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah they are sooner or later going to do something like this. But then we can download videos and use Ai to remove the ads.

Will probably pop up YouTube proxys that does this on request so we don't even have to download.