Just a coincidence

A couple of days ago I remember seeing a post that BaidUTube has started sending ads inside the video stream instead of requesting them separately. I immediately thought that re-encoding full videos would be costly and they probably would pull the same trick as Tw!tch (another company which name shan’t be taken in vain) by inserting ad fragments into HLS or DASH playlist among the ones with (questionably) useful content.

Also a couple of days ago yt-dlp stopped downloading videos from BaidUTube in 720p for me, resorting to 360p. I don’t mind much but I got curious why. Apparently BaidUTube stopped providing full encoded videos except in format 18 (that’s H.264 in 360p) even for the old videos. The rest are audio- or video-only HLS or DASH streams.

Probably they’re just optimising the storage by getting rid of those unpopular formats and improving user experience while at it. In other words, see the post title.

P.S. I wonder if they’ll accidentally forget to mark ad segments in the playlist as such but I’ll probably see it when that happens.

P.P.S. I guess I should find another time wasting undemanding hobby. That reminds me I haven’t played OpenTTD for a long time…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 25th, 2024 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Useless Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Just a coincidence”

  1. Paul says:
    June 26, 2024 at 3:28 am

    Finally fixed .mm seeking support for this game format.
    Real Education is crucial.

  2. Kostya says:
    June 26, 2024 at 3:54 am

    Nice!

  3. Peter says:
    June 26, 2024 at 6:28 pm

    Fantastic. Need to pay closer attention to librempeg.

  4. MoSal says:
    June 27, 2024 at 5:20 pm

    “I wonder if they’ll accidentally forget to mark ad segments in the playlist as such but I’ll probably see it when that happens.”

    I’m no expert since I dealt with the networking side more, but I don’t think this can be done transparently and easily.

    Ad tags in playlists are not just ad tags.
    They exist to tell the multimedia playback engine to “reset” before the ad starts and after finishes.

    For the “reset” to not be needed, they would need to “deep-fake” the ad segments served to each client, in real time, and down to the timestamps of the samples inside.

    Even if we assume it’s doable, it still feels like it would be too much trouble for them to consider it. They might as well go the DRM route at that point.

  5. Kostya says:
    June 27, 2024 at 11:27 pm

    That’s reassuring.

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