I can’t believe someone put in pictures what I’ve been playing out in my mind all along.
You made the comic.
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?
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.
Different CDN with better allocation of resource and location than the CDN for the content you’re watching.
Makes sense, the ad people are the real customers vs your attention the product.
Years ago I had the free version of Hulu that came with ads (it used to have the free ad tier, and the paid-for-no-ads tier). Hulu did the dynamically scaling resolution to match your connection thing, which was mostly good for me since I didn’t have great internet and I’ll take smooth playing 720p over constant buffering. I don’t know if the ads scaled or were naturally at a reasonably low resolution, but I never had a problem with them playing through
One day though, something changed. Suddenly ads were coming in only in the highest resolution supported by Hulu at the time. Thanks to my terribly slow internet, this meant horrible buffering. Combined with ads being louder than programs, a 30 second ad turned into a multi-minute experience of a few frames at a time screeching at me before buffering again.
I didn’t keep Hulu long after that.
Network engineer here. There’s a lot of reasons your network might not work well. None malicious.
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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.
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Your network may be bottlenecked somewhere. Try using speedtest (search for it) and see if you’re getting slow connection quality.
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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.
Tracking is actually incredibly tiny bandwidth-wise. Like, fractions of a fraction of your bandwidth. Adserv is also very tiny due to modern edge server infrastructure. Ads are static content. It’s already cached and likely within the same city as you. That’s part of why ads tend to play perfectly and fast while the content can be slow. On the other hand, that obscure 200 sub guy ranting about why the square-headed screws inability to catch on is a giant American conspiracy to keep Canada from commercial dominance is almost certainly not locally cached. It has to come from Google’s video content servers way out in silicon valley.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, if they didn’t push trash with their algorithms, maybe people would finish more videos.
Tell this to them, not to me. Moreover I’m not talking about a specific site but rather about the general technical implications you’d have if you’re hosting something.
with my garbage connection it’s still a reality for me
I’ve been watching JPEGs uninterrupted for ages.
