It probably saves insane amounts of bandwidth. But at what cost :(
The cost of shareholder profits.
wait isnt it the other way around, buffering was costing profits for shareholders so they limited it?
I’m sure they have a legitimate numerical value for it
I dunno, I’ve been in a few meetings where people with deep pockets make critical infrastructure decisions based on extremely limited information. Trusting “them” to have a valid metric is a rookie mistake.
The older you get you realize more and more that the people making the decisions are totally clueless.
…Until you become one of the decision makers.Yep.
At my first job I was in charge of implementing new software (definitely not in my job description - I was basically a secretary). I was discussing security concerns with the head honchos and they interrupted me and dismissed my concerns because they “only hire honest people.”
They gave everyone admin permissions.
at which point all doubt is removed?
Yuuuuuuup.
“How much will option A cost? Dunno.”
“What about option B? Dunno.”
“My gut tells me B is much more expensive than A though.” “Yeah for sure. But I prefer B.”Wanna waste a hundred grand a year? Go right ahead, who cares. Wanna hire someone? Woah hold your horses there bucko, don’t you know we have budget limitations??
Curious as to why that would be the case. Unless people are starting videos, letting them buffer, then reloading and doing it again.
It should be the same amount of bandwidth, otherwise, right?
It’s just people not finishing videos. Buffered but never played. In aggregate it adds up to a lot.
Yeah i dont use youtube like that either but lots of people open videos and close them without finishing them because loss of interest or attention or whatever.
People opening 8 hour long music videos, then pausing them after half an hour and just keeping it open while they do something else.
Then they come back after multiple hours and just close the browser.
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Letting the entire video buffer is the same as downloading the entire video which you can still do. My favourite tool is yt-dlp
It’s a pretty great tool. Downloaded the entirety of Murder Drones on Saturday to add to my Plex server. Strictly for preservation, going to re-watch on YouTube to support them
You can also setup a script to automatically download a channels latest vid so you don’t need to check the website anymore.
fun fact: according to sponsorblock, youtube is testing ads that are baked serverside into the video. so one day even downloading might not be ad free
They will never be able to block me just using the mouse to skip forward. If its already downloaded theres zero buffer lag.
I will create another step that converts the format to an open one if they somehow block that too.
Its an accessibility thing for me. Ads literally cause me harm. They cannot possibly win me over i’ll just end up doing something productive instead.
It will be detectable as per US law. Ads must be marked.
For now you can use vpns to certain countries that don’t have ads at all, I expect that will still work to avoid server side ads.
Beat me to it (by several hours).
I’m not watching on YouTube. If I want to watch, I’ll download it first. yt-dlp 9n the desktop, seal (yt-dlp underneath) on android.
In case of YouTube you can actually dump the link into VLC, and it will happily buffer the whole video while paused. This probably works with other sites, but I have only tested YouTube.
Alternatively you can of course just download the video with yt-dlp, and then play it locally
And I’ve just learned of another reason why VLC is fucking great.
Yet some people on here like shilling mpv. I’ve used both but vlc makes me feel at home.
I can’t believe someone put in pictures what I’ve been playing out in my mind all along.
You made the comic.
I miss the days when my much slower internet connection let me download entire videos faster than streaming to watch them with less buffering and fewer glitches. Now that I have a rock solid gigabit fiber connection with single digit latency, how is watching video such a bad experience?
Because of all the telemetry and ads loading in the background.
No matter how fast your connection is, a 30s ad takes half a minute to play.
The frustrating thing is that when I do see ads, the ad itself plays in higher resolution, and plays more smoothly than the video I’m trying to watch.
Different CDN with better allocation of resource and location than the CDN for the content you’re watching.
Makes sense, the ad people are the real customers vs your attention the product.
Years ago I had the free version of Hulu that came with ads (it used to have the free ad tier, and the paid-for-no-ads tier). Hulu did the dynamically scaling resolution to match your connection thing, which was mostly good for me since I didn’t have great internet and I’ll take smooth playing 720p over constant buffering. I don’t know if the ads scaled or were naturally at a reasonably low resolution, but I never had a problem with them playing through
One day though, something changed. Suddenly ads were coming in only in the highest resolution supported by Hulu at the time. Thanks to my terribly slow internet, this meant horrible buffering. Combined with ads being louder than programs, a 30 second ad turned into a multi-minute experience of a few frames at a time screeching at me before buffering again.
I didn’t keep Hulu long after that.
If you watched in in 320p like the old days then it might be faster?
Internet providers have more or less been given permission to throttle and be selective all they want, due to the Supreme courts recent rulings. Before that, they at least tried to hide it.
Run your stuff through a good vpn and you might d8scover all of your problems disappear. It sure as heck does on t-mobile.
I’m sure the practice of net neutrality helped back then. Sure net neutrality is the rule again, but that doesn’t mean everyone instantly started following the rule.
I feel like a lot might have to do with shitty hardware in smart TVs, but idk if you use a smart TV.
Generally not. Nowadays it’s difficult to avoid a smart tv, but that doesn’t mean you need to use that functionality …. I am now, mostly because my firestick is getting shittier plus doesn’t have an Apple TV app. However I mostly watch streaming video on tablet
I remember when we were still on dial-up and I found a youtube video I wanted to show my brother, I’d let it buffer and load and have to keep the pc on the entire day until he got home from work.
The grey is faster than the red, then I ask to myself, what a wonderful world.
But I was told that the red ones go faster.
Like workday hours v weekend hours.
I used to queue videos up the night before, then be able to watch them on the ride to school. Then one day you couldn’t do that anymore.
Yep. They want you to buy premium and download them now
There use to be a feature in Internet Explorer where you could download a local copy of a webpage and specify how many links deep you wanted it to go. It maxed out at 5, which would grab the entirety of any fansite I pointed it at.
Also clicking on some previous segment and NOT having the video load again. Idle for too long and the video unloads.
And now you get a bonus ad when you skip back too!
That shit infuriates me. I sometimes get distracted, skip back like 30 seconds, and get 30 seconds of unskippable ads. Fuck me.
And clears manuallly set quality settings back to auto.
Modern ABRs are actually quite sophisticated, and in most cases you’re unlikely to notice the forward buffer limit. Unstable connection scenarios are going to be the exception where it breaks down.
For best user experience it’s of course good practice to offer media offlining alongside on demand, but some platforms consider it a money-making opportunity to gate this behind a subscription fee.
My internet is intermittently like 100mbps and 256kbps. It sees the 100mbps and acts like it’s going to be that way forever, so doesn’t buffer the whole video while it has the fast speed, then drops entirely when it slows down.
An ABR is generally going to make an estimate based on observed bandwidth and select an appropriate bitrate for that. It’s not out of the question that you run out of forward buffer when your bandwidth takes a nosedive, because the high bitrate video is heavy as all hell and the ABR needs to have observed the drop in bandwidth before it reconsiders and selects a lower bitrate track.
I’m not familiar with ABRs affecting the size of the forward buffer, most commonly these are tweaked based on the type of use-case and scaled in seconds of media.
If that were true then users wouldn’t hate and complain about it. This post existing is proof that it’s shit because clearly it’s not as seamless as you’re making it out to be.
The thing is that you can’t notice when it’s working on account of how seamless it is. Yes, sometimes it breaks down, but these are the exceptional cases.
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And then there is youtube which just discards the whole buffer content each time an ad plays. Very sophisticated. Although knowing google that behavoir is likely on purpose
Realmedia has entered the chat
Uggghhhh
I thought the connection I was on before was pathetic dog shit (moved rural and went from 1g to 100mbps up/down at both) and the only issues I ever had was specifically peacock because that app is designed to work just poorly enough that I’ll struggle with it
Literally haven’t thought about video buffering since like… 2014, 2013? Unless of course my Internet drops out. And that includes on mobile devices
I shudder to think what y’all are running on
The secret is that 90% of the time for 90% of people, the current method of “just in time” buffering works as good or better. Especially if you’re on your phone you don’t want to be paying for buffering data far into the future.
But the 10% of the time that it DOESN’T work when it usually does, really sticks in your brain so everyone has the experience of it not working now.
I wanna go back to the wild west days of the internet where no one ever got banned for trolling or shitposting.
The censorship gestapo has started to ban shitposters from shitposting subs here on lemmy. That’s how oversensitive everyone is now
The problem is culture changed. How far people were willing to push it 10xed and 100xed. I’ve been on free speech forums like Voat, then Ruqqus. But people are just too nasty to behave, and then not enough “normies” come to drown them out. You’re left with a hate fueled, self censoring circlejerk.
(Same applies to allowing full shitpost ability on larger sites, just in smaller corners)
You’re still allowed to call them names like ‘shitposter’?
I’m about to back to mirc and see if there’s anything left there.
Sounds like someone wants to openly use bigoted language without repercussions on privately-owned social media platforms.
Right?
The repercussions come from the choices of those who hear/see th.e bigotry.
Let them shout and announce themselves so they can be known.
In the “wild west” days there was a certain “terrorists handbook” circulating with detailed instructions on how to make all sorts of things.
I’m very happy that sort of thing isn’t easily available to everyone anymore.
Trolling then and “trolling” now are just not the same. The meaning behind the word has evolved to mean something malicious. Trolling back then meant more like a practical joke. Like telling a noob alt+f4 will give them buffs in a game.
But you’re trying to compare a time where the internet had few million of users rather than a few billion ones.
Oh, and people got banned ALL THE TIME before too. I don’t know if you remember mud’s or IIRC. But I do. Banning annoying people was very common. Certainly ain’t nothing new. Behave or gtfo.
https://archive.org/details/the-anarchist-cookbook-william-powell
The internet still has the data, it’s just more organized now.
Been a very long time since I’ve seen this in digital form. I really thought it would be more difficult to find this these days.
Thought I didn’t really look for it either I suppose.
I remember when I first ran into this. It was on a BBS. It felt like forbidden knowledge. It felt like this was a big secret.
But now that I’m not an edgy teenager anymore, I realize it’s just a library book. The trouble with getting older, is you learn how to organize the world so it feels smaller
I can’t exactly say I’ve seen it in my local library. I remember this being circulated and just really hoped that the idiots in my class wouldn’t blow their hands off.
I used to be able to load up a bunch of videos in different taps. Close the laptop and drive into the bush to watch shit and smoke a joint.
Fuck that sounds amazing, I so miss weed
What’s stopping you?
My job. Random piss and yearly follicles, just not worth the stress of trying to pass that shit.
Jesus. Even before the legalisation here in Germany, I’ve not had a job demanding these drug tests. Here’s to hoping that the rest of the US follows suit
The only time I notice it not working that way still is if my internet cuts out or the page itself is having problems and it won’t load at all. Otherwise it loads the entire video pretty quickly. Like don’t even have to pause it to see the gray line getting lighter because it goes so fast it’s done loading a 20 minute video within the first 30 seconds of said video.
Now, if I am watching cable TV on the other hand… That shit buffers like crazy. And it’s even weirder that I have cable internet. How is my internet faster than the TV when they use the same lines?
It’s called DASH protocol and it’s designed to only have a small adaptive bandwidth buffer. The whole video will never buffer, only a small percentage of it.
