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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
It will be detectable as per US law. Ads must be marked.
Download the video twice and only play the common parts.
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 on the desktop, seal (yt-dlp underneath) on android.
Edit: Big finger problems
Wow, Seal is very much improved since I last looked at it. It has a million options, and custom commands and everything.
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.
And the developers behind VLC seem like very cool people, too!
The one thing I prefer about MPV is its ability to navigate frame-by-frame both forwards and backwards. That feature is useful for finding the right frame to screenshot. VLC can only do it forwards. Reading the feature request or whatever on the VLC repo, the devs keep shutting down suggestions with stubborn reasons why it can/will never be implemented.
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.
You might want to look into Youtube Revanced or Newpipe.
Or grayjay or Firefox with ublock origin
And clears manuallly set quality settings back to auto.
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 it in 320p like the old days then it might be faster?
But 360p today looks far worse than 360p back then. Not only have bitrate etc. been reduced, older videos have also been re-encoded multiple times.
It’s pretty wild. I have recently been ripping my DVD/Blu-ray collection and encoding them from a clean rip to my server. Encoding at 480p is perfectly acceptable if you’re starting with a high enough bitrate source. You can tell it’s 480p, but its so much better than Netflix’s absolute trash streams that will give you “UHD” at bitrates lower than a DVD. 360p does leave something to be desired, but they’re still perfectly watchable.
There are certainly shows and movies that deserve higher definition, but I’ve found that unless they’re from the ground up meant to be purely visually masterpieces, it’s better to have lower resolution and a matching bitrate than to ruin the experience with artifacts.
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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.
Why does tmobile not throttle your traffic when it’s running through a VPN as well?
Most providers will just try to control specific sites to save on bandwidth. If they did it to all sites then they couldn’t claim they have X speed. They’ll even try to give extra bandwidth if you go to well known speed testing websites.
When going through a vpn, they don’t know what websites and data your requesting, so it’s outside their parameters they have set up to throttle.
Network engineer here. There’s a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.
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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.
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Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you’re getting slow connection quality.
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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.
Tracking is actually incredibly tiny bandwidth-wise. Like, fractions of a fraction of your bandwidth. Adserv is also very tiny due to modern edge server infrastructure. Ads are static content. It’s already cached and likely within the same city as you. That’s part of why ads tend to play perfectly and fast while the content can be slow. On the other hand, that obscure 200 sub guy ranting about why the square-headed screws inability to catch on is a giant American conspiracy to keep Canada from commercial dominance is almost certainly not locally cached. It has to come from Google’s video content servers way out in silicon valley.
Network engineer here
slow connection quality
engineer here
running it indefinitely for a little while
engineer here
Never ascribe to malice what can be attributed
engineer here
Yeah, I’m not writing a network policy nor did I say I was an English teacher.
Could I have made everything perfect? Yes
Does it matter? No
If anything about what I said was unclear to you, I can clarify. My job is about network engineering, not pleasing English elitists online.
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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
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
I just showed how inexpensive it has become.
Do you think I think I’m youtube??
You showed your home bandwidth. It means absolutely nothing in this discussion.
How often do people watch the first few seconds of a video and not finish it? It happens a lot. It probably happens a lot more often than that user actually finishing it. We could be talking about doubling Google’s bandwidth requirement. Not to mention server CPU time, disk I/O. Do you have any idea how expensive the operational costs of YouTube probably are as it is? This is an efficiency game to successfully run a video platform which supports up to high bitrate 4k video at this unfathomable scale, servicing the entire planet.
It makes the most efficient sense for them to only let you buffer a little bit at a time, not more than you need.
I’m not kissing Google’s ass. I’m just pointing out that if you want the service to exist, it has to be designed as efficiently as possible, otherwise it won’t exist for long.
Man ive got like 8 tabs right now with paused videos cause I cant focus on shit
It’s not that bandwidth is incredibly expensive, it’s more that it’s a limited resource, videos are huge, and there’s a gajillion users.
Yes.
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.
Well, if they didn’t push trash with their algorithms, maybe people would finish more videos.
Tell this to them, not to me. Moreover I’m not talking about a specific site but rather about the general technical implications you’d have if you’re hosting something.
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.
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.
Seriously, load the next 15 minutes, then start loading that when it plays those 15 minutes
Wow, this guy solved the problem just like that. It is almost like there must be some other reason they did this other than what they say.
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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
People hate corporations so much that they forget some times they do make smart choices. That bandwidth doesn’t just exist from nothing, it’s electricity being moved around. The environmental impact, even as infinitesimal as it may be, isn’t worth the convenience imo
The hypocrisy of this when they’re chugging power for AI…
Defending no explaining yes.
Need to chill out not everything you do not understand needs to be an argument.
Multi-hour long music videos? What?
Beethoven’s 7th symphony, the music video.
🤟🔥
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.
Compilations exist.
I guess. I don’t know why anyone would watch a 2 hour compilation for 3 videos though.
“Lo-fi beats to study to”
Lots of people just need filler music while doing something for several hours, yt playlists are ass, picking a new song every 2-9 minites is quite disruptive, and any form of autoplay will eventually dump you in alt-right politics.
You’ve never seen a Video DJ mix before? They can go on for several hours and have more than just 3 songs—usually a dozen or more—all mixed seamlessly into one continuous mix with no gaps between songs. And if the person who made the mix is a real DJ, the songs are also BPM- and Key-matched with each other, which sounds absolutely amazing when done right. It’s one of the better ways to enjoy music.
Oh no, google lost .3cents of bandwidth. the horror.
Even if it was 3 cents in bandwidth (it’s not), that’s 1.3 billion dollars in additional costs. You want more ads to pay for that?
And thats probably a rounding error in googles costs.
For a much more usable, enjoyable experience.
That you’re arguing against, because wont someone think of poor googles downtrodden finances.
Billion dollar costs aren’t rounding errors even at YouTube/Google’s scale. They’re a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it’s hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It’s especially hard to justify when there’s an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.
Now after the second commercial I hit a youtube downloader from a European vpn. I still download it all just to watch what I want.
Why European VPN?
Fun fact: if you bypass DPI in Russia, ypu can watch youtube without ads. Because youtube temproary disabled them.
Fun fact: with Firefox and uBlock Origin you can watch YouTube without ads.
And you can do it on mobile too.
Don’t they inject ads in videos now?
Haven’t seen any ads so far.
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.
Here’s one video I wanted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O2g3Ql3nRU
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.
Fuckn sweeet
Neat
Champion.
Yeah I used Kdenlive and did need to transcoded the whole thing.
Yes can use Seal (GitHub/F-droid) on Android or yt-dlp on a PC to download a video in any resolution with audio
Thanks. I’ll check out Seal.
I wrote a Python tool that does it for you. It’s because of the newer dash/ adaptive bit rate formats. Just hit the checkbox to combine afterwards. https://codeberg.org/ArtisanByteCrafter/pytube-gui
That’s amazing. Thanks.
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.
YouTube didn’t support long videos until they implemented this. There was a hard limit of about ten minutes.
This shaped (for example) the Let’s Play culture of fairly short installments. It took Deceased Crab an entire year to play La-Mulana.
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.
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
It won’t. This place is fucking doomed, the evangelicals are taking over.
This was the way!
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.
Yep. They want you to buy premium and download them now
Aren’t there some like open source extension for this now?
On Android you can use Newpipe instead, it allows you to download them.
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.
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.
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
I’ve been running adblockers since the beginning of time so I can’t speak to this behavior. Spontaneously it seems a bit amateurish, though.
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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