It seems like the logical way to work

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

The cost of shareholder profits.
- wait isnt it the other way around, buffering was costing profits for shareholders so they limited it?
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.
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.
- Yeah i dont use youtube like that either but lots of people open videos and close them without finishing them because loss of interest or attention or whatever.
- 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.

I can't believe someone put in pictures what I've been playing out in my mind all along.
- You made the comic.

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

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
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
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
- Wow, Seal is very much improved since I last looked at it. It has a million options, and custom commands and everything.

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.

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.

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.
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.
Network engineer here. There's a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.
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.
Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you're getting slow connection quality.
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.
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.
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

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
- Yes.
- It's not that bandwidth is incredibly expensive, it's more that it's a limited resource, videos are huge, and there's a gajillion users.
- Like others mentioned - yes, I mean the bandwidth from the perspective of the one providing the service. For the same bandwidth that someone watched 10% of a video, paused it and never watched the remaining 90%, you can show those same 90% to someone else who'd actually watch it. That's without counting the small overheads here and there, but hopefully you get the idea.
- That 10Gb link is almost certainly oversubscribed, though. You don't actually have 10 Gb of dedicated constant bandwidth, you just have access to 10Gb of potential bandwidth. You're unlikely to saturate that link very often, so you won't notice, but it's shared with other people.
  It's different from Google or any other company paying for bandwidth that's being actually used, not just a pre-allocated link like your home internet.

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

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
- Defending no explaining yes.
  Need to chill out not everything you do not understand needs to be an argument.
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?
Multi-hour long music videos? What?
- Beethoven's 7th symphony, the music video.
- People stitch together what is essentially a play list of music videos because YouTube's actual playlist feature kinda sucks. Has something to do with longer videos, engagement and ad revenue too but I'm not privy to that Eldritch knowledge.
- Compilations exist.
Now after the second commercial I hit a youtube downloader from a European vpn. I still download it all just to watch what I want.
- Why European VPN?
  Fun fact: if you bypass DPI in Russia, ypu can watch youtube without ads. Because youtube temproary disabled them.
What's going on with YouTube video downloading? Any route I take to try to download, it only gives me the option of 1080p video only and a different option for audio only. I've recently downloaded a couple of videos my kids watch for offline use and I had to put the downloaded files into a video editor to combine the audio and video myself.
Here's one video I wanted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O2g3Ql3nRU
- If you ever find yourself combining audio and video again, check out mkvtoolnix. In this situation, a video editor is overkill and potentially transcodes the audio or video, taking an hour. This tool is basically winzip for video files, it lets you swap audio and video tracks around in a few seconds.
- Yes can use Seal (GitHub/F-droid) on Android or yt-dlp on a PC to download a video in any resolution with audio
- I wrote a Python tool that does it for you. It's because of the newer dash/ adaptive bit rate formats. Just hit the checkbox to combine afterwards. https://codeberg.org/ArtisanByteCrafter/pytube-gui
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.

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?
This was the way!

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?

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.

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.
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.
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
- I've been running adblockers since the beginning of time so I can't speak to this behavior. Spontaneously it seems a bit amateurish, though.

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

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've been watching JPEGs uninterrupted for ages.

If you're on Windows download potplayer and copy video links to one in potplayer

If you wait potplayer will buffer the entire video or a good chunk of it

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.

with my garbage connection it's still a reality for me

What I did was open 4 videos and go to the next tab when one started buffering