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Tangential question to anyone reading this: How does uBlock Origin block in-video ads that are in video format? I thought all those are embedded in the video stream and served from the same hosts that serve the video. If not, how has YouTube not changed the way it serves the video to disable such blocking functionality? Note that this is not about text ads that may be overlaid in the video or text ads elsewhere on the YouTube page.

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I imagine that encoding the ads into videos would be too expensive. Ads change often and are personalized, so the video streams would also need to be personalized and couldn't be cached and served from a simple edge CDN anymore. Instead each ad is it's own stream which is loaded (or in this case, not loaded, so instead of blocking playback entirely it just skips the ad).

Not a direct answer to your question, but look up a browser extension called "SponsorBlock". It auto-skips in-video ads. These days I don't watch YouTube without this.

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