Why YSK: Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it. It’s better to find a free alternative, both for your wallet and for your peace of mind.
Introducing: ViMusic
Downloads: https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic
- Free and open source
- No ads/trackers
- Song lyrics
- Music from both YouTube Music and YouTube
- Weights 2MB or so
- Beautiful UI and amazing UX
Cons: no high kbps streaming support
DO NOT TRY TO DOWNLOAD THE APP FROM ANY SOURCE OTHER THAN THE ONES LISTED IN THEIR GITHUB PAGE. They are malware.
Savor it. Google is about to shut those down. They recently figured out how to tell if a user is watching the ads or not an interrupt the streams to them.
I’ve seen two separate methods so far one where they just block the stream when it gets to the add point, and another where they completely blocked all my clients except the official YouTube. I’m sure we have a lot of cat and mouse left in us, but in the end, if they solve this on the server side there’s probably not a lot we can do about it
It’s just like any DRM - fundamentally impossible. It’s not possible for YouTube to truly verify that a stream is legitimate on a device they don’t control. It’s impossible. But they can make it very annoying and time consuming to circumvent their system, and that’s what they might do. It might be enough to deter a decent portion of people watching with adblockers and using third party programs. That’d be a success in the DRM world. So yeah, this can’t be solved by YouTube sever side, but their defences might still be annoying enough to work.
It’s a change but it’s certainly not impossible.
The server send you enough of the stream that you can watch up to the first commercial. The commercial starts playing they send you the entire commercial. They then refuse to send you the rest of the stream for the length of the commercial. They can’t force you to watch the commercial but they can certainly withhold the content from you for a sufficient period of time to make it annoying. You could get around it by having a multi content set and have the browser grabbing and throwing it to you ahead of time, but it would pretty much stop it for hey go look at this video.
Another tactic might be to require logins to see any content. Have the servers track your amount of time streaming. If the amount of time they’re sending you active stream data isn’t much more than the length of the content flag your account and shut it down.