As I know they transcode every uploaded video to their preferred format. They could use the same infrastructure for the ads. But maybe it’s really too expensive.

Yes for example if you return always the same segment when skipping.

Out of order requesting of segments could be detected as well as faster requests. This would at least lead to a waiting time for the length of the ad.

Ah ok I didn’t know the EU thing. For the algorithm it’s a cat and mouse game. You could try to detect it by hash signatures of the segments or some kind of image detection but they could in turn add bytes to change the signature or other attributes. Could require a lot of effort on the blocking site to have the indicators up to date.

Exactly

Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don’t know the numbers maybe it’s still cheaper.

I’ve read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven’t looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.

Sponsorblock works with static timestamps provided by users. This would not work if the ads are inserted at randomized times.

That wouldn’t make sense in the case of hls since the stream consists of multiple fragments of a video and you would just insert the ad fragments. This would only require changing the index file which could be done again and again with no effort and needs no reencoding of the video file.

I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can’t differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can’t prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it’s an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.

I talked about the

substantial enough to need an installer

line. Like what makes a game substantial enough to need an installer ? Steam and every other game launcher with install capabilities is more or less just a fancy installer. There is no more effort needed for a publisher to generate a new installer binary than it is to generate a new steam patch. Even if gog installers are offline it’s more or less an archive with a binary stub to unpack it and the install script. This one is on the publisher and not on gog. And for the version difference, do you have an example where the gog and steam versions differ ?

I don’t get that installer thing ? Steam downloads the game executable as well as all of the required libraries and assets into the steamapps directory and runs install scripts. It also runs potentially needed dependency installers like c++ visual studio redistributables or directx installers. The same thing does the gog installer. And the games I own on gog have always had version parity with the steam versions. I thought this would be the standard if a publisher publishes on both stores.

So what’s the problem about using third party clients like heroic game launcher ? Or did I understand the first line of your post wrong ?

This is for Butter? I use this for eggs.

It’s all about “follow the science” until it doesn’t align with their opinion. WHO actions are sometimes questionable and the intentions are not always quite clear, but it’s the same source of information that was used before, when covid was all around.