It probably saves insane amounts of bandwidth. But at what cost :(
The cost of shareholder profits.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
I can’t believe someone put in pictures what I’ve been playing out in my mind all along.
Letting the entire video buffer is the same as downloading the entire video which you can still do. My favourite tool is yt-dlp
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
It will be detectable as per US law. Ads must be marked.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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…
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.
They do that to punish people with slow internet. Use yt-dlp instead
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!
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
yt-dlp
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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??
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.
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.
Right?
bigoted language
Censor a bigot one day, censor someone with something important to say the next day
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)
