Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?
HTML5 made video a first class citizen of your browser and buffering is handled automatically now 🙂
Oh! I just assumed they were trying to save $ on all those looong “___ 10 hr version” videos or something.
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.
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.
I’m guilty of this. I’ll queue up long music mix or ambient videos and just leave them going.
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.
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.
You should add them to a Playlist to save them for later
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 folderdeleted by creator
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.
IIRC YouTube breaks the videos up into chunks to achieve that
YouTube still buffers video?
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.
i think its cus a 4k 60hz video would brick anyones ram
It would buffer to a temp folder. Storing it all in RAM would be pointless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not even a 144p video buffers till the end, 10 min at most
No, it’s cost saving
I bought the whole ram I’m gonna use the whole ram
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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.
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.
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.
Youtube videos were limited to eleven minutes, and you had to load them in one resolution, from beginning to end.
I moved circa 2008 and my internet service ended a few days before I actually left. So I’d bring my laptop somewhere with wifi, load a bunch of videos in tabs, and go home. I think I can date this comment more precisely by saying some of the videos were Let’s Play Trespasser, hosted on Vimeo, back when Let’s Plays were a thing and Vimeo allowed them.
It does not, no
It very, very obviously and observably does, though.
Yep, just right click and turn on stats for nerds and you can see it graphed
If you think that was bad, you never tried to download porn on a BBS with a 2400 baud modem.
I am sure there are a few plugins you can use to make it work again.
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AFAIK, the primary motivations were skipping ahead and changing resolution. If you wanted to bump all the way up to 720p, on your fancy 10 Mb/s connection - you’d have to start the whole video over. There was no way to deliver a video file except from beginning to end. So there was also no way to jump to the middle, and avoid a boring or familiar introduction, except by dropping to 144p potato quality and loading the while video in seconds rather than minutes.
In hindsight this is kinda dumb. The whole ordeal was in Flash. Youtube essentially delivered a poorly-sandboxed program for decoding their own video format, and it still took them ages to figure out they could stitch together smaller segments.
Actually that might point to the real reason it changed: Google bought them. Google bought them and their storage-space concerns disappeared. There was no more reason to limit everyone to ten minutes and fifty-nine seconds of, let’s be honest, 480p30 video in 4:3. Longer videos would force them to implement seeking, seeking obviously demands segmentation, and segmented videos would allow them to switch resolutions on-the-fly, which lets the video keep playing at lower resolution if your bandwidth sucks.
Not that dropping resolution to avoid hitches worked, until Flash was dead and buried.
