They do that to punish people with slow internet. Use yt-dlp instead
I can’t believe someone put in pictures what I’ve been playing out in my mind all along.
You made the comic.
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.
No, it’s a matter of feedback. Right now how it works is the video stops playing, and maybe it’ll start in 3 seconds, or maybe it’ll never start again until I’m dead and don’t give a shit anymore. Before you caught up to the buffering bar, and it stopped, but you got some indication of how long it’ll take, or if it was just broken and needed to be restarted.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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?
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.
Because of all the telemetry and ads loading in the background.
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
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.
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.
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.
Why does tmobile not throttle your traffic when it’s running through a VPN as well?
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
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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.
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 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
I shudder to think what y’all are running on
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.
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.
I wanna go back to the wild west days of the internet where no one ever got banned for trolling or shitposting.
The censorship gestapo has started to ban shitposters from shitposting subs here on lemmy. That’s how oversensitive everyone is now
Sounds like someone wants to openly use bigoted language without repercussions on privately-owned social media platforms.
bigoted language
Censor a bigot one day, censor someone with something important to say the next day
Right?
The repercussions come from the choices of those who hear/see th.e bigotry.
Let them shout and announce themselves so they can be known.
I’m about to back to mirc and see if there’s anything left there.
a/s/l?
16/f/cali 🗿🗿🗿
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)
You’re still allowed to call them names like ‘shitposter’?
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.
You can still readily do the old school trolling without repercussions as well. So I don’t get the nostalgia either.
That information is exactly as easy to get as it was then. It’s always taken just a bit of curiosity and a touch of internet know-how
https://archive.org/details/the-anarchist-cookbook-william-powell
The internet still has the data, it’s just more organized now.
Been a very long time since I’ve seen this in digital form. I really thought it would be more difficult to find this these days.
Thought I didn’t really look for it either I suppose.
I remember when I first ran into this. It was on a BBS. It felt like forbidden knowledge. It felt like this was a big secret.
But now that I’m not an edgy teenager anymore, I realize it’s just a library book. The trouble with getting older, is you learn how to organize the world so it feels smaller
I can’t exactly say I’ve seen it in my local library. I remember this being circulated and just really hoped that the idiots in my class wouldn’t blow their hands off.
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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?
What I did was open 4 videos and go to the next tab when one started buffering
