Microblog Memes

It probably saves insane amounts of bandwidth. But at what cost :(

Letting the entire video buffer is the same as downloading the entire video which you can still do. My favourite tool is yt-dlp

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.

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?

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.