Spyke

It's both. Buffering the whole video was a waste of bandwidth and the changes for HTML5 means they could get away with lowering the buffering limit without destroying everyone's viewing experience.

41
lemmy.sdf.org

For longer videos, a lot of people will stop watching before the video ends. A lot of bandwidth is wasted by buffering the entire video when the user is only going to watch 50% of it. To save bandwidth, sites like YouTube only buffer a tiny bit at a time.

58

I meant something like opening a two hour long podcast and only listening to 30-60 minutes before closing the tab or switching to a different video. With the old functionality and current internet speeds, it likely would have buffered the entire video in only a few minutes. It could have wasted multiple GB of bandwidth.

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Comment105reply
lemm.ee

I'll open dozens of 15-45min videos, watch a few to completion, close the rest after watching a tiny bit or nothing at all.

5
Yogareply
lemmy.world

You should add them to a Playlist to save them for later

1
Comment105reply
lemm.ee

you're not gonna believe this

so I used to make a new set in the bookmarks folder, then I pull all the current tabs into the new set, then I never watched it ever again
there are probably ~400 links in that YouTube Sets folder

3

Tf thats kind of autistic I used to have a similar problem but I try to keep the list down to like 10-20 cuz be honest if you were truly interested in all 400 of those videos you'd be watching them anyways.

1
Azzureply
lemm.ee

What he means is that, in olden days, videos would just keep buffering until the whole video was loaded. Now it's only at most the next ~1min, no more. You were able to see the grey bar thingie go all the way to the end.

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CeeBeereply
lemmy.world

It would buffer to a temp folder. Storing it all in RAM would be pointless.

12
Actersreply
lemmy.world

Some people's internet and hard drives would be crippled by this. It's to promote multitasking mostly. There are ways to download videos that I won't get into, but it is possible if you desperately want to buffer the whole video. I do think it's stupid to lock offline video downlaods behind a subscription paywall, but I am small fry and will do what I can.

3
CeeBeereply
lemmy.world

Not at all. If your hard drive would get crippled by a few GBs then I don't know what to tell you. When the playback is stopped, and the application closed, then the temporary files are discarded.

The argument about bandwidth usage is accurate though. I didn't make sense to buffer the whole video when it might not be watched anyways.

3
Actersreply
lemmy.world

I have replaced so many hard drives with solid state drives when the complaint is slow computer. the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape. So yeah, there is reason to believe that many people out there buy cheap stuff only for them to need to upgrade for more money in the near future or they live with the slow unfit for the task hardware.

Yeah, it is bad practice to use up bandwitdh with unneeded downloads when the user is there for short periods or watches small parts or one time. There are plenty of users on pay as you go plans or their infrastructure is slow and limited capacity that we call metered lines. These metered lines can be a last resort reduncy line for network stability. I have seen clients add a wireless line that is cheap to keep active, but they pay for the amount of data used.

I think the end of buffering the whole large content stream is a good thing. I believe you can add an extension to Firefox that allows for video content to be fully buffered if you want to.

1

the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape.

The real problem here is Windows. I've seen Windows thrash spinning rust disks continuously for hours and hours until I shut it off. I put Linux on there to see what happens and it's happy as an otter with a clam.

1
Echo Dotreply
feddit.uk

Especially since some companies are still pushing out computers with only 16MB of RAM in 2023, even a Gameboy emulator would almost max that out.

0

Did you mean GB? I can only assume so. They had Gameboy emulators before we even got to 1GB of RAM so I'm not really sure what you're talking about on that front either.

5

No one is producing computers with 16MB of ram that are meant to watch videos. Some laptops are still being made with ~2gb RAM. And some computers (in a different sense of the word) are currently being made with less than 32 kb of ram.

2

Yep, just right click and turn on stats for nerds and you can see it graphed

3

If you think that was bad, you never tried to download porn on a BBS with a 2400 baud modem.

6

You reached the end

Found this dusty antique from the days when video players would let you buffer. If only this were still a thing. | Spyke