Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
Platforms can now insert ads directly into the manifest file into totally random timestamps. The file chunks’ names follow the same pattern as the original video. You cannot filter or prepare for it. Probably that will be the future. (AWS MediaConvert can do this for example.)
And they only create the manifest file upon starting the stream so you can inject personalized ads too.
I guess we will have to compare the last video frame and/or audio sample of every segment to the first frame and/or sample of the next segment or something like that?! Maybe the effects of “the loudness war” in ads will help us detect ads solely by the loudness change within the audiostream?