Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?

      • skulblaka@kbin.social
        40·
        9 months ago

        It’s both. Buffering the whole video was a waste of bandwidth and the changes for HTML5 means they could get away with lowering the buffering limit without destroying everyone’s viewing experience.

  • DreamySweet@lemmy.sdf.org
    602·
    9 months ago

    For longer videos, a lot of people will stop watching before the video ends. A lot of bandwidth is wasted by buffering the entire video when the user is only going to watch 50% of it. To save bandwidth, sites like YouTube only buffer a tiny bit at a time.

      • DreamySweet@lemmy.sdf.org
        25·
        9 months ago

        I meant something like opening a two hour long podcast and only listening to 30-60 minutes before closing the tab or switching to a different video. With the old functionality and current internet speeds, it likely would have buffered the entire video in only a few minutes. It could have wasted multiple GB of bandwidth.

      • Comment105@lemm.ee
        5·
        9 months ago

        I’ll open dozens of 15-45min videos, watch a few to completion, close the rest after watching a tiny bit or nothing at all.

            • Yoga@lemmy.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              Tf thats kind of autistic I used to have a similar problem but I try to keep the list down to like 10-20 cuz be honest if you were truly interested in all 400 of those videos you’d be watching them anyways.

    • Azzu@lemm.ee
      48·
      9 months ago

      What he means is that, in olden days, videos would just keep buffering until the whole video was loaded. Now it’s only at most the next ~1min, no more. You were able to see the grey bar thingie go all the way to the end.

          • Acters@lemmy.world
            3·
            9 months ago

            Some people’s internet and hard drives would be crippled by this. It’s to promote multitasking mostly. There are ways to download videos that I won’t get into, but it is possible if you desperately want to buffer the whole video. I do think it’s stupid to lock offline video downlaods behind a subscription paywall, but I am small fry and will do what I can.

            • CeeBee@lemmy.world
              41·
              9 months ago

              Not at all. If your hard drive would get crippled by a few GBs then I don’t know what to tell you. When the playback is stopped, and the application closed, then the temporary files are discarded.

              The argument about bandwidth usage is accurate though. I didn’t make sense to buffer the whole video when it might not be watched anyways.

              • Acters@lemmy.world
                1·
                9 months ago

                I have replaced so many hard drives with solid state drives when the complaint is slow computer. the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape. So yeah, there is reason to believe that many people out there buy cheap stuff only for them to need to upgrade for more money in the near future or they live with the slow unfit for the task hardware.

                Yeah, it is bad practice to use up bandwitdh with unneeded downloads when the user is there for short periods or watches small parts or one time. There are plenty of users on pay as you go plans or their infrastructure is slow and limited capacity that we call metered lines. These metered lines can be a last resort reduncy line for network stability. I have seen clients add a wireless line that is cheap to keep active, but they pay for the amount of data used.

                I think the end of buffering the whole large content stream is a good thing. I believe you can add an extension to Firefox that allows for video content to be fully buffered if you want to.

                • CeeBee@lemmy.world
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape.

                  The real problem here is Windows. I’ve seen Windows thrash spinning rust disks continuously for hours and hours until I shut it off. I put Linux on there to see what happens and it’s happy as an otter with a clam.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          11·
          9 months ago

          Especially since some companies are still pushing out computers with only 16MB of RAM in 2023, even a Gameboy emulator would almost max that out.

          • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
            5·
            9 months ago

            Did you mean GB? I can only assume so. They had Gameboy emulators before we even got to 1GB of RAM so I’m not really sure what you’re talking about on that front either.

          • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            No one is producing computers with 16MB of ram that are meant to watch videos. Some laptops are still being made with ~2gb RAM. And some computers (in a different sense of the word) are currently being made with less than 32 kb of ram.