> Even if the client would recognise ads somehow

Sponsorblock uses community driven marking of ads edited into the video.

I think you're right, that you wouldn't be able to skip an ad at the beginning of the video - you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad, so only skipping ads in middle of the video would be possible.

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jack_pp 4 days ago | parent [-]

> you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad

Not sure I understand this. I don't think it's possible even now to load the video in the background, youtube is already smarter than this and it will load a short period of time whenever u seek anywhere, it doesn't just download the whole thing if you pause the video.

And the way I'm suggesting wouldn't be mitigated by sponsorblock since you wouldn't be able to skip it if you want to stream the video. Only way would be to use yt-dlp and remove the ads automatically but I suspect a tiny percentage of users would go to that length to avoid ads

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Etherlord87 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Not sure I understand this.

Imagine that you open the video on one tab, see where the ad IN MIDDLE of the video is (e.g. because of a system like Sponsorblock, other users reported it), click on progress bar to go after the ad, the system is probably smart enough to show the ad anyway - OK, you mute the ad, and open the same video again, and watch it from the beginning. By the time you get to the ad, you can switch to the other tab, where the ad already played.

Of course it wouldn't work if the ad was at the beginning.

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jack_pp 4 days ago | parent [-]

The way I imagined it you wouldn't know where the ad is, they can insert it on the fly at any point. It wouldn't count in the video seek bar.. at any random point they want they can just insert it and you can do nothing about it except mute it and wait it out.

	▲	Etherlord87 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		In such case take the worst (maybe disregarding 20% worst) ad length, and open a copy of the video advanced by that length. As soon as the ad starts to play, switch to the copy of the video. Of course you could be unlucky and the copy could get the ad at the different video time but same playback time. You could decrease the chance of it happening by additional copies, but the ads take small enough percentage of the time for 3-4 copies to make it very rare for such an overlap to happen. Edit: actually, you could make a double buffer, so if you assume the ad takes up to 10 s, the copy of your video can skip 20 first seconds, play, eventually play an ad if it happens first on that copy, continue playing, and as soon as the main video get an add, go back on the copy to the right spot. So in order for this to fail, with just one copy, you need to either get an ad during the first 10 seconds, or the ad has to start exactly (within the lag time of let's say 50-200 ms) at the same time on both copies.