It probably saves insane amounts of bandwidth. But at what cost :(
The cost of shareholder profits.
Also clicking on some previous segment and NOT having the video load again. Idle for too long and the video unloads.
And clears manuallly set quality settings back to auto.
And now you get a bonus ad when you skip back too!
Letting the entire video buffer is the same as downloading the entire video which you can still do. My favourite tool is yt-dlp
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
It will be detectable as per US law. Ads must be marked.
They will never be able to block me just using the mouse to skip forward. If its already downloaded theres zero buffer lag.
I will create another step that converts the format to an open one if they somehow block that too.
Its an accessibility thing for me. Ads literally cause me harm. They cannot possibly win me over i’ll just end up doing something productive instead.
For now you can use vpns to certain countries that don't have ads at all, I expect that will still work to avoid server side ads.
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
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
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.
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.
Yet some people on here like shilling mpv. I've used both but vlc makes me feel at home.
And the developers behind VLC seem like very cool people, too!
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
If only there were some middle ground between multi-hours and 30 seconds.
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
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.
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?
And thats probably a rounding error in googles costs.
For a much more usable, enjoyable experience.
That you're arguing against, because wont someone think of poor googles downtrodden finances.
Billion dollar costs aren't rounding errors even at YouTube/Google's scale. They're a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it's hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It's especially hard to justify when there's an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.
They do that to punish people with slow internet. Use yt-dlp instead
yt-dlp
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.
I remember when we were still on dial-up and I found a youtube video I wanted to show my brother, I'd let it buffer and load and have to keep the pc on the entire day until he got home from work.
I can't believe someone put in pictures what I've been playing out in my mind all along.
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
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
I just showed how inexpensive it has become.
Do you think I think I'm youtube??
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