[jasode]

>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time.

I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads.

The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the streams for dynamic ads insertion as it gets the next media fragment(s). The new behavior is to have just one indistinguishable stream that's more tightly embedded into the video media fragments.

If the above paragraph doesn't make sense, one can just load up a Youtube video while monitoring the "Network" tab in F12 Developer Tools to see the various media fragments being downloaded while it switches between the normal video and the ads.

[TheAceOfHearts]

You can strip the ads from the final video or have the player automatically skip the ads while playing. The client will probably have some way to distinguish sections. Worst case scenario you're just ending up in a DVR-style scenario where you have to press some button to skip +30 seconds in the downloaded file. And eventually someone will make a tool to filter out the ads or crowdsource a solution.

[danaris]

It shouldn't be that difficult for video downloaders to learn how to strip out in-video ads. They're going to be a sharp cut both in video and audio, for a specific, fairly-well-known length of time, then a cut back.

[Lockal]

And even if platform starts to make blurry transitions for ads, adjust volume/brightness, or even overlay ad text over existing video like a watermark, client can just download the same video multiple times and remove unique frames/pixels.

[ballenf]

If the ads are in-stream, it should actually make it easier to skip from a frontend interface. If you know or can figure out their length.

[immibis]

It's a given that they'll start and end on keyframes, so you can cut the middle section without losing or re-encoding anything. (It's a given because Google wants to do the opposite - insert them without losing or re-encoding anything. Even if they did re-encode, the sharp transitions would generate keyframes anyway)

[1234554321a]

This is the kind of thing where people will put a lot of effort to engineer a good machine learning / AI solution to get rid of these ads. If it’s something that people hate they’ll put all their effort into stopping it. Google might’ve actually made their situation worse with this as it’ll force people to innovate and come up with new ways of countering their bs.

“Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as much as a common hatred for something.”

[joquarky]

In the book/movie Contact, the person who bankrolls the main character's project made all of his wealth from creating inventions that defeated advertisements.