YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.
This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.
For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.
Switch to 3rd party clients like pipe-viewer (doesn’t need api key), it’s less likely (though I suppose not impossible) google would roll this out against 3rd party clients as they can’t track you for targeted ads.
To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)
Peertube is fine, but like lemmy (but worse), there’s barely anything there. Nebula at least got creators from YouTube to make ad-free versions for Nebula. If the channels that a person are subscribed to don’t exist in Peertube, that’s not an appealing alternative for them.
If they are injecting ads into the actual video stream; it won’t matter what client you use. You request the next video chunk for playback and get served a chunk filled with advertising video instead. The clients won’t be able to tell the difference unless they start analyzing the actual video frames. That’s an entirely server-side decision that clients can’t bypass.