h4lf8yte

German account tho. Expect nothing from my people they are brainwashed as fuck.

I feel the same about this. For me, It kills the best aspect of games, the playful learning. You just can't go into any competitive game today without reading meta or you get crushed. But this is my free time. I want to spend it like that and just be creative and find my own solution to problems and still stand a realistic chance without having to have a second job studying the games meta. It's the try and error discovery that made games fun for me and the feeling when you found your unique way to do things and others couldn't counter it easily. But today it's just about mastering a technique somebody else showed you.

As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it's really too expensive.

Yes for example if you return always the same segment when skipping.

Out of order requesting of segments could be detected as well as faster requests. This would at least lead to a waiting time for the length of the ad.

Ah ok I didn't know the EU thing. For the algorithm it's a cat and mouse game. You could try to detect it by hash signatures of the segments or some kind of image detection but they could in turn add bytes to change the signature or other attributes. Could require a lot of effort on the blocking site to have the indicators up to date.

Exactly

Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don't know the numbers maybe it's still cheaper.

I've read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven't looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.

Sponsorblock works with static timestamps provided by users. This would not work if the ads are inserted at randomized times.

That wouldn't make sense in the case of hls since the stream consists of multiple fragments of a video and you would just insert the ad fragments. This would only require changing the index file which could be done again and again with no effort and needs no reencoding of the video file.

I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can't differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can't prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it's an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.