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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I remember when the old youtube player would just load and buffer the entire video, making replay ability very easy since you didnt need to redownload it. Somehow we regressed.

Google takes everything that works PERFECTLY FINE and turns it into a steaming pile of … I am gonna stop right there.

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That was the ancient flash player days, where it would buffer the entire FLV. One time a kid in HS Physics had 20 tabs of anime buffered on his absurd 17" laptop.

With more bandwidth and higher resolution videos, buffering an entire video in RAM is no longer a great option... plus they can make you buy YouTube Premium for offline playback!

I remember even after flash player it buffered video though? They changed the behavior after Flash was dead probably as someone else suggested to not waste bandwidth on people closing the tab.

Edit: in fact every native web video player downloads as much as possible as far as I can tell.

The native <video> and <audio> tags buffer a few megabytes at a time. This is easy to see by opening a video file in the browser (not from file://) and watching the network tab.

Depends on how you set it up apparently, I assume it changed over time:

    preload= "metadata" - is the default which is 2-3% of the video.

    preload="none" - no video will be downloaded on page load

    preload="auto" - the entire video is downloaded. (Some browsers do not do this, and only download partial videos anyway)

It used to be that if your network was bad, you could just play the video once without watching, and then you could play it again and watch it without it locking.

Nowadays, if your network is bad, you can just forget it. Every single media site seem to have migrated into this format at around the same time. It's obviously to stop downloaders, what it evidently didn't, but it will never change back.

Is it to stop downloaders? I doubt it since they work just fine, it's probably just a way to reduce resource usage on more constrained platforms like low end mobile phones or smart tvs.

There is probably a lot of code sharing among all platforms such that companies don't want to support two different buffering flows.

It also decreases bandwidth and processing server-side, when a user leaves before finishing the video.

It's MPEG-DASH, and I think Apple has HLS. It's basically better by every possible metric _except_ the one you mentioned, which I'm sure you'd agree is an uncommon use-case. It's not designed to stop downloaders, it's trivial to download.

If you really want to play things multiple times, you can probably muck with your browser's cache settings, just tell it to cache a ton. I used to do that in Firefox when my mobile connection sucked, so I could buffer it all up and then just watch. Or easier yet, just use a download tool.

Why not just go with the flow and use/develop a downloader browser extension?

I've used them a few times for dealing with a bad network.

But this is a "me" solution, and I'd imagine those sites would like to be accessible for more people. (I'm personally a very bad "customer" for them.)

Anyway, it's a mild annoyance for me (I have that "me" solution), and not really my problem to solve.

> I remember when the old youtube player would just load and buffer the entire video, making replay ability very easy since you didnt need to redownload it. Somehow we regressed.

When did that change? I already considered youtube's UX to be so hostile I'll go for (literal, not metaphorical) years between intentionally watching 2 videos off there. It's also possible i just didn't notice as the data transfer from there is impressively fast via google fiber (likely not coincidental).

> Google takes everything that works PERFECTLY FINE and turns it into a steaming pile of … I am gonna stop right there.

Google's SDLC in 4 steps: 1) "Acquire" software idea (invent/buy/steal/kill/etc). 2) Dev to critical mass (unlimited money cheat). 3) Enshittify (Ads team trounces Dev team because capitalism). 4) Sunset before mob descends with fire and pitchforks.

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