That would do, yes. But, if they keep changing the ads then it just uses up more power, as well as any cryptographic hash checking failing (they might not do su

That would do, yes. But, if they keep changing the ads then it just uses up more power, as well as any cryptographic hash checking failing (they might not do such a thing, but the people should insist on formats of URLs with the cryptographic hashes in order to avoid this problem). (If they are also always same then also you can easily make the file to specify which parts of the video (such as ads, but it could be anything that you want to) which should be skipped. If there is always a key frame after each ad (which I hope that there should be), then hopefully it should be possible to save disk space by omitting the ads, too.) (Or, are YouTube going to get rid of all of the key frames to try to restrict user choice (and end up reducing reliability too)?)