Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?
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.
If you think that was bad, you never tried to download porn on a BBS with a 2400 baud modem.
YouTube still buffers video?
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.
i think its cus a 4k 60hz video would brick anyones ram
It would buffer to a temp folder. Storing it all in RAM would be pointless.
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.
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.
HTML5 made video a first class citizen of your browser and buffering is handled automatically now 🙂
Oh! I just assumed they were trying to save $ on all those looong “___ 10 hr version” videos or something.
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.
