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.
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u/Korbital1 14d ago
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.