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.
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??
I can't believe someone put in pictures what I've been playing out in my mind all along.
You made the comic.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's logical if you're the user.
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.
Is bandwith that expensive nowadays? I feel the argument is valid but was implemented when bandwidth was way more expensive.
I mean, if I upgrade my home internet box to the 40€ tier I'll have 10Gb symmetrical.
Edit: there are a lot of google fanbois here lol
It’s not about your bandwidth, it’s about YouTube’s bandwidth. You probably don’t care, but for them it adds up to a lot
Just download the video then.
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
If only there were some middle ground between multi-hours and 30 seconds.
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?
This is a weird point. Like yes, Google is a government subsidized monopoly. But to keep this feature is a massive waste of resources.
Like from a tech perspective, this should not be done. Like fuck Google can be a thing and will have no impact on that
I used to be able to load up a bunch of videos in different tabs. Close the laptop and drive into the bush to watch shit and smoke a joint.
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.
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.
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.
The grey is faster than the red, then I ask to myself, what a wonderful world.
yt-dlp
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.
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.
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