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Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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I wonder why they would kill old videos instead of just removing those 10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches. You'd think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space.
Someone above posted an article saying they aren't actually. But you'd be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They're highly compressible since they're just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that's the idea)
Sometimes they are, if it's just audio and a static image. Some of them definitely are not that though. The ones with visualizers or full music videos or the like are not nearly as compressible.
I tend to fall asleep to one of those videos of being on the beach with ocean sounds, so /shrug.
Not the same as 10hr nyan cat or bacon pancakes
Definately not the same. Also, what "nobody watches" is in the eye of the beholder.
So to combat use cases like this, why not just add a repeat option? There would be no break if it cached the beginning again.
Also just download the audio you want and loop it yourself. It would take roughly 2 minutes and use way less bandwidth.
The first two minutes are an ad, and having a loud voice talking to you all of a sudden in your bedroom while you are asleep tends to wake you up.
With compression techniques being as they are today, I truly don't even worry about the bandwidth.
But manually looping any part of it inside the video which you can do past the first 2 minutes would still not be an ad. Also, who doesn't use an ad blocker on YouTube? All of those problems that you listed have incredibly easy solutions that you can execute with zero training.
And realistically if they are looking for profit (and they absolutely are) I still see no reason why they would keep these up. The benefits are absolutely minimal at best and the drawbacks are quite large.
My YouTube app on my phone, which doesn't have an ad blocker. And as far as I know, there's no way to restart a video at a certain timestamp, it just restarts from the very beginning. I'd be glad to hear otherwise though?
Ah! A few ways to do things:
If you have questions, ask away!
Thanks for the info, much appreciated!