this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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does this mean stuff like yt-dlp will download videos with ads in thrm as well?
Almost certainly not, although fair disclaimer, I don't actually know. Ads need to be tailored to the user when delivered, so it's likely the YouTube frontend requesting the next chunk of video to be an ad instead of the next chunk of video from blob storage. yt-dlp likely just requests successive chunks straight from blob storage, passing this.
If YouTube served ads by saying "point to an ad chunk next" in their blob storage, 1. Everyone would see the same ad and 2. Premium users would still see ads.
To patch this, YouTube really needs to stop serving video chunks directly from storage, but I forget the reason they haven't done that already.
(Technical note; I'm assuming blob storage chunks contain 1-2 seconds of video and metadata pointing to the next one, like a linked list. I'm not sure if this is how YouTube works, but many video platforms do this)
yeah that makes sense. i was thinking maybe youtube had servers to decide what chunks clients would get, maybe by looking at whether or not they are premium users first. but anyway youtube still needs a way to differentiate between ad chunks and video chunks, otherwise we would just be able to skip 10 seconds through all the ads. surely that can be exploited somehow.