If they’re predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they’re not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you’d need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
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Yeah that could work… What about creating some sort of *arr for YouTube videos that downloads them and processes them with some sort of AI audio/video processing to remove the ads and recombine the video.
Youtubarr it could be called. If we really want we can also remove the ads from the creator in the video too. It would still count as a view to the video too so creator won’t lose out on money.
Anyone with objections to this?