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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
Network engineer here. There's a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.
You're watching it in high def on a slow connection. Try going back to the "good old days"of 360p and see if it's fast.
Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you're getting slow connection quality.
You may be getting packet loss. Using the ping command, try running it indefinitely for a little while (windows key+r, cmd, "ping 8.8.8.8 -t") see if there are blips of failures.
Remember! Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Your isp, Google, and yes, even Microsoft, don't want you to have a bad experience using your computer. Lots of people with 0 networking knowledge but a bone to pick with the system will give you unhelpful advice.
Oh no, I attribute it all to cheap/lazy streaming providers and excessive tracking/ads. I’ve always had well above the bandwidth required and speed tests bear that out
However if the streamer is overloaded or being careful not to send bits faster than it deems necessary, it doesn’t matter how good my network is.
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.
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
Imagine how for every one user doing this deliberately there are nine who pause a video and forget it in the background, wasting bandwidth in the process.
Like others mentioned - yes, I mean the bandwidth from the perspective of the one providing the service. For the same bandwidth that someone watched 10% of a video, paused it and never watched the remaining 90%, you can show those same 90% to someone else who'd actually watch it. That's without counting the small overheads here and there, but hopefully you get the idea.
That 10Gb link is almost certainly oversubscribed, though. You don't actually have 10 Gb of dedicated constant bandwidth, you just have access to 10Gb of potential bandwidth. You're unlikely to saturate that link very often, so you won't notice, but it's shared with other people.
It's different from Google or any other company paying for bandwidth that's being actually used, not just a pre-allocated link like your home internet.
Youtube stop doing this because people would pause a Multi-Hour long video (such as a music video) download the entire thing, only to then only watch 15 minutes of it because that's the bit they wanted. Massive waste of bandwidth
What do you mean “waste of bandwidth”? We’re paying for that through government subsidies and selling our personal data. Are you seriously defending a corporation that made $250 billion last year in ad revenue alone?
People stitch together what is essentially a play list of music videos because YouTube's actual playlist feature kinda sucks. Has something to do with longer videos, engagement and ad revenue too but I'm not privy to that Eldritch knowledge.
What's going on with YouTube video downloading? Any route I take to try to download, it only gives me the option of 1080p video only and a different option for audio only. I've recently downloaded a couple of videos my kids watch for offline use and I had to put the downloaded files into a video editor to combine the audio and video myself.
If you ever find yourself combining audio and video again, check out mkvtoolnix. In this situation, a video editor is overkill and potentially transcodes the audio or video, taking an hour. This tool is basically winzip for video files, it lets you swap audio and video tracks around in a few seconds.
The amount of times my video brings unplayable even though it has a few minutes buffered is too damn high. Almost all the times my video gets stuck, is that scenario. Not to say it happens all the time.
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.
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.
It took like an hour for an image of the Ultra 64 (N64) controller to load on my screen from the reveal in Japan. I remember waiting as each line of the image would slowly appear on a grey scale laptop screen over dial up. My eleven year old mind was blown, worth it.
It sucks for livestreams on youtube too, since it only starts downloading the next chunk of video when it's almost done playing through the current chunk and if you experience a hiccup, then youtube's solution is to send you back in the livestream (amount depends on latency setting of the streamer) so instead of getting a nice live stream, you could be going back as far as around 20 seconds in the past, so if you want to participate then you're going to be that slow on your reaction. Instead of waiting for the full 5 seconds of the buffer to play through before downloading the next chunk, I wish they'd query for the next chunk before then and not only that, but if there's a hiccup, don't send the stream back by so much, because also if you fall too far behind then it skips ahead. It's all over the place.
When it does that I usually set the speed to x2 to catch up. I'm surprised that setting is still there, I don't know of any other use for it in a live stream
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Has YouTube live streaming just shit the bed for anyone else this past week? That and the main page has been laggy to the point I'm being brought the wrong videos when I click on something. I assume it's because of uBlock Origin.
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.
The problem is culture changed. How far people were willing to push it 10xed, then 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)
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.