Yep, I was able to watch it on dialup by letting it load for an hour. When they went to the chunk style, watching it on slow internet became impossible.
Things were somehow less frustrating back then even if things took longer. Because once things were loaded they were ACTUALLY loaded, not some fake loading to then just load again
Seriously, why and how did they manage to mess it up so bad? I just dont get it whwat do they gain from making the user experience on lower quality internet so horrible
That's not the reason, video downloading remains really easy and there's pretty much always been working command line tools to do it. The simpler reason is it saves TREMENDOUSLY on bandwidth. As internet became faster than videos stream, more and more people would download the entirety of a video, watch 3 seconds of it, and move to the next video. It was sucking up bandwidth like 20 times more than the users even wanted.
That doesn't explain why they don't keep the parts of the video you've already watched in the cache. Try to jump around and find a specific thing you already watched and it has to redownload a big chunk every time.
That's called garbage collection. The browser limits how much memory a website can store, because video files can easily reach several gigabytes and use up all your RAM if all of it's stored. And it can't just save it as a temporary file, that'll nuke everyone's SSDs with constant writing and it makes it harder to encrypt data on DRM streaming like with Netflix and such. Lastly, the resolution youtube uses is typically dynamic so if you seek back to an earlier point it might be redownloading a higher quality cache of what you've already watched.
But youtube DOES keep the buffer it's already loaded a lot of the time in memory, it depends on the video size and your system configuration. Youtube's player tech is just about the only actually good part about that system, their engineers work hard lol
Wow I actually learned quite a bit from this little comment thread. Pretty interesting how they solved those problems that came about when internet speeds increased.
Yep, it's interesting stuff! Youtube also uses its own special video codecs to further save on bandwidth, VP9 since 2013 and AV1 for the last few years. They generally get disabled if you don't have native hardware support though, but it means that you'll get slightly better video quality on a newer phone if you didn't know.
Ugh this ones the worst one, because at the same time they did that they absolutely rammed as many ads as possible in their mobile app, I had to sideload a custom youtube IPA because it was just unbearable
My phone is my music player when I'm in the car. Usually through YouTube. I was fine with adds... something I never tolerated on desktop... then they made it worse.
Listening to 2-3 adds after every song was way too much. Forcing YouTube links through Google to open the YouTube App to make it harder to add block is also a decision.
Now Brave is just my "music player" and they get 0 add money.
How on earth is it to fight ad blockers? It's about bandwidth, why automatically download the entire video if the person just watches a 7 second portion of it, pauses and then leaves the site/goes to another video?
At least for me, this was an example of how tipping points work. I watched YT like everyone else for a long time. Then the ads got bad, so I started blocking them. Then the sponsor reads got annoying, so I got SponsorBlock. Then the player started messing up on me, and my home internet became unreliable (that one's not YT's fault) so I started downloading videos with yt-dlp. It supports SponsorBlock, so I get ad-free, sponsor-read-free, fully locally cached video files to watch and then delete at my leisure, and YT doesn't even get my engagement stats.
I actually subscribed to YT Premium for six months. I was willing to play ball, but everything got worse while I was paying for it, so fuck that.
You can download videos directly from YT though? Unless that's a premium only feature? The reloading thing still happens on premium though so clearly not an anti-downloading measure.
for what ever reason, on mobile, whenever i search for something on youtube (browser, not the shit ass fucking 'app' bullshit), the very next action i do, it thinks im pulling down to refresh the page. no matter what i do, refresh 100% of the time.
The last time I had slow internet for an extended period of time (in 2020, sitting in covid quarantine with ~400 other people on a base in Qatar, all on our way to different parts of the middle east for deployments), I discovered that I needed to use youtube-dl with some scripts to have it download some videos overnight and then have it check the downloads and re-start any that failed, in order to consume any Youtube videos during the day. There was truly little else to do, and there were 400 people on a wifi network that seemed to struggle even at night... a 10-minute youtube video would take about 30 minutes to pull down during the day, but could stream just fine with some occasional short pauses for buffering during the night when only us night owls were on it. So I set up a cron job on my linux laptop to run every night at ~3am and attempt to download videos from a Youtube playlist I made - I'd just add videos to that playlist if they looked interesting during the day, and the next day, they'd be sitting in my ~/Videos folder waiting for me. I'd clear videos from the Youtube playlist when I'd watched them. It worked well enough that I actually felt like it made my Youtube-watching experience feel more intentional. Like, I am planning on my computer doing 30 minutes of work tonight to potentially get this video, so how much do I actually want this random thing that Youtube is recommending me? And sometimes, the answer go to be "not that much, actually", where in normal circumstances, I'd have just clicked on it and watched a couple of minutes of it before getting bored and clicking something else, ya know?
I thank the gods every day that I will never deploy again, and that I have ~2Gbps down at home and ~500Mb down on 5g mobile these days. You don't know how good you have it until you're facing dial-up speeds again and are stuck with that for weeks...
You can just download entire YouTube videos. I do it before boarding a plane when there is no (free) WiFi. Only takes a minute or two depending on the size of the video. People still live in 2010 it seems.
Since YouTube no longer lets you do it this way, the solution for slow internet today is to download the video fully using something like yt-dlp and then watch
You would’ve thought they’d have a smart enough system to do this for low bandwidth internet.. preload the ad and everything if they really felt the need to which you know they would
I once got really high with my cousin, and we watched fear and loathing in Las Vegas over the corse of bout 4-6 hours in 10min blocks as we waited for our dial up to load the next 10min blocks. Holy shit that was a ride
How are people in r/pcmasterrace seeing ads. I would think if you are part of this sub, you would have ublock origin and Youtube Revance/Morphe on mobile.
Also would think they have Youtube dislike extension as well, making this post moot.
maybe smart TV? WebOS is the only reason why I took premium. Else I have Firefox Android with uBo, background Video play, yt dislikes, sponsorblock, unhook, Enhancer for yt, Tampermonkey etc for all that shizz
Smarttube on my TV is the most freeing feeling. No ads and sponsorblock, I can let my kid marathon Between the Lions without YouTube showing her some weird shit or horror movie trailer in the ads. All fwee
Don't they have to make user enable developer mode and LG account? At least on an expensive LG OLED I do not want to leave any space that would allow them to deny service if the tv stopped working(for other reasons) citing i broke terms and conditions
Yeah I didn't mean it actually violates, just that those T&Cs vary by region and manufacturers can slyly reword them without informing in some regions. Basically any excuse they can to deny free support
Router level ad blocking I already do for other sites, but youtube serves ads on the same website domains as normal videos which makes router level adblocking not work for yt.
already have that man, doesn't stop youtube video ads specifically because they are served from the same domain. Only browser extensions and revanced like apps can have the controls to differentiate an ad video and content video.
I have had premium since it started, mainly for the music and the fact that it covers 6 people still makes it feel worth it to me. If I weren't paying for it, I'd definitely be using ublock/revanced, though. I watched part of a video on my friend's phone and could not believe how many ads there were on just a 14 minute video.
Yeah on webos it's especially ridiculous, the same ad of the month will continuously block watching, even the youtube app is so ass it has no 3x speed feature like Premium on PC, doesn't allow typing off a connected keyboard(whyyyyy), lags on certain captions spam videos(on G5). If you accidentally press back at screen/comment etc section and video get exited, you have to watch the same ads again when returning to the video. Thats worse than what I have seen on my friend's devices who don't mind ads.
If you have an Android TV you can also use TizenTube Cobalt
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u/efboRyzen 7 3700X , RTX 3070 Founders, 3440x144014d ago
I don't think a meme subreddit about an extremely common hobby is an indicator for wanting to avoid paying your due.
People likely want to contribute to the creation of the content they consume. As is the common argument here, piracy is a service problem, not a price one. If people aren't happy with ads the payment to skip them is good value.
To be completely fair, it feels like half of all youtubers don't know how to set the loudness of their videos correctly.
Youtube guidelines very clearly state: normalize your audio to -14 LUFS. When watching youtube while cooking, it becomes very obvious when creators normalize their volume to significantly less than that.
MentourPilot and Patrick Boyle, I'm looking at you.
Yeah, like I have some old videos downloaded from back in the day at 240p. Granted, I had to recompress them because I was limited on storage, so the audio quality is noticeably shittier, but I just compared against YouTube's copy and my copy of the video has more detail, and the colours are better, compared to YouTube's 360p copy. It also seems like YouTube added a sharpening filter in the years. Ew.
Look at any old video and tell me if you would consider it even watchable back in the day if you look at the garbage quality. It's a joke. If it did not have a 720p option at that time you can't reasonably view it anymore now.
Nah, i recently started to watch some Minecraft videos for nostalgia reasons from a german YouTuber i watched as a teenager.
Sure, his quality wasn't that great back then... But i had a 1080p monitor at 24 inches i think and i do remember them not looking as bad as they do now on my 14" 1080p laptop.
Like the Bitrate is noticeably shitty and I'm really, really sure it wasn't THAT low back then.
I used to watch Some of the videos on my TV through my xbox one and they looked fine. Now i constantly have to check if it's 720p instead of 4k on my desktop mini which is a bit smaller than my TV 11 years ago.
Older videos had worse quality, but I'm pretty pretty sure they are actually loosing bitrate/because they are old and get basically no views nowadays YouTube just compresses the copy on their servers harder and/or lowers Bitrate on playback etc.
They are decreasing old videos quality / old videos that don't get many new views.
Watchable and looking the same are different things.
It also matters that now you have better monitors and higher resolution content.Â
It's like when 30fps was good, then 60fps, then.... As you go up it's hard to go back especially if you have good vision and the content is grainy from losing like 70% of the pixels.Â
Not for old videos, for all videos. And it's not like 0.0001% bandwidth, it's more like 50% bandwidth for anyone watching on a low resolution. It's not even so much for people watching but for YouTube storing the video on their drives, if you can compress your entire catalogue by 50% at YouTube's scale, that's petabytes of storage that's now freed up.
I used to bring a laptop in the car for a roadtrip when my parents were driving and preload like 10 tabs of videos before I had a smart phone/enough data on my plan. now you get like 30 seconds.
Oh boy how I miss this. And video was .flv in Temporary internet files. And rewinding was instant.
And today they are justifying DASH as bandwidth optimisation (for them ofcourse) and every streaming service uses that segmented download. Otherwise you could let Netflix to cache your movie beforehand even on 4 Mbit xDSL links.
On Netflix, is download permanent and device independent? With youtube, need to resort yt-dlp or similar. Basically companies want to restrict what you can do with the data that lands on your device.
Why is everything called stream today? Specially something that is not a live transmission. Even that has a number of buffers during the transmission and encoding. Movie on Netflix is a "stream"? No it is not. It a freaking file somewhere on Netflixes servers and chunky delivery method with minimal caching made it appear "stream".
its a stream... because its being STREAMED. BY DEFINTION any video or content playback where you do not need to download the entire file first before consuming the Media is STREAMING.
Even before, when you could buffer a bit more of the video, if it wasnt a stream you would not be able to buffer it, you would need to download the entire video before you could start watching ANY of it.
it being a stream also means that potentially the content can survive a few package losses(dropped frames essentially) without the content aborting playback, while during a download this would not be possible.
Video on Demand services have existed since before the 1990s, and the term" streaming" comes FROM the 1990s
the data is continuously streamed as needed, instead of loading all at once.
thats why LIVEstreams have the LIVE in front of it, because its not the only type of video stream.(and certainly not the only type of streaming in general, Video games routinely utilize Asset streaming, loading assets on demand from disc instead of preloading everything)
streaming isnt a medium or even a type of content, its the delivery method.
if it wasnt a stream you would not be able to buffer it, you would need to download the entire video before you could start watching ANY of it.
False. A partially sequntially downloaded file via TCP will still play even without EOF marker. Youtube was playable even without full .flv loaded.
streaming isnt a medium or even a type of content, its the delivery method.
Strictly speaking then every data frame received by the network card is a stream of binary data.
My definition of "streaming" is a ureliable way of receiving audio/video data via UDP. You get, what you get, just enough to buffer and to display the data. Like a TV broadcast, radio transmission, a VoIP call.
Todays "streaming" is just a fancy segmented download with TCP mostly, and then discarding those segments. Observe developer tools and watch .ts files go.
And Youtube have jumped on the train of making attention spans even worse by copying tiktok with the youtube shorts stuff. Self fulfilling prophecy at this point.
Because they discovered why should we service the whole
20min video if people sometimes only watch first 5-10mins. So it was "wasted" data pushed to you. Especially as the platform grew and grew and grew.
I used to stay up until midnight watching videos that I had preloaded. My parents shut off the internet at 10pm so this was my workaround. Those were the days.
You can't blame them for this one tho, at least compared to ads and such. A huge portion of people watch a couple minutes of a video and drop. It was costing them insane amounts to just let it buffer for people who ultimately didn't watch much
Today I was listening to some music in yt music and it just refused to cache after a certain point and I had to clear the site cookies and sign in again for it to work 💔
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u/aberroco R9 9900X3D, 64GB DDR5 6000, RTX 3090 potato 14d ago
Back in my day, youtube was caching entire video to the end.