VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos

Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by gergles on Monday April 06, 2015 @01:13PM (#9329238)

Too bad they can't get rid of DASH, because DASH is the real problem behind buffering, jerky playback and other nonsense. I really strongly dislike how bad the video playback experience is and has been for quite some time on YouTube.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by deelowe on Monday April 06, 2015 @02:26PM (#9329777)

It completely breaks fast forward and rewind. Why do they even leave the playback indicator interactive if it's going to cause the video to re-buffer every time you even look at it funny?

I watch a lot of youtube these days and when I'm sub'ed to a channel, I shouldn't have to deal with buffering just to skip excessively long intros that I've seen for the 50th time.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by higherpurpose on Monday April 06, 2015 @01:48PM (#9329499)

I agree it's annoying. In its effort to save seconds of bandwidth from each video, Google has made everyone's Youtube experience worse.

Fine, don't load the whole video ahead of time, but can you just load the first say 30 seconds? Or maybe even - and I know this is going to sound crazy - a whole minute ahead of time?

I remember a time when it seemingly didn't load even 5 seconds ahead of time. That's just ridiculous. Fire the bean counters who are in charge of that short-sighted idea.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by anon4 on Monday April 06, 2015 @02:02PM (#9329599)

I remember a time when the flash player loaded the entire video to a temp file and you could just go through /proc/$firefox-pid/fds, find it and dump the video that way.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by teach on Monday April 06, 2015 @03:48PM (#9330298)

Pretty sure I still have a bash script laying around to automate this process.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by mkagenius on Monday April 06, 2015 @02:12PM (#9329666)

The behavior is different for different resolution videos I think. Instead of seconds, I think they download x kilobytes ahead of time. Just try 360p vs 1080p (for same video).

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by cpeterso on Monday April 06, 2015 @03:22PM (#9330145)

YouTube's playback latency is critical. If users have to wait for the video to buffer, they are more likely to close the tab and do something else.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by Dylan16807 on Monday April 06, 2015 @04:06PM (#9330410)

It's a limit on how much it buffers while playing. It does not improve the playback experience in any way, and causes significant degradation when you seek the video.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by DaveMebs on Monday April 06, 2015 @02:56PM (#9329965)

DASH is purely an XML format for describing server-side content. The issues you are describing have nothing to do with DASH and are due to implementation decisions in both the JS player and the underlying MSE object.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by Macha on Monday April 06, 2015 @02:44PM (#9329897)

The YouTube Center plugin for Firefox and Chrome allows you to disable DASH.

It's been removed from the Chrome Web Store though, so installing it on Chrome on Windows is a pain. Still on AMO for Firefox users though.

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by adventureloop on Monday April 06, 2015 @03:28PM (#9330173)

I am not sure why anything uses DASH, but the problem isn't just limited to it. Http video streaming is quite hard to do well, a lot of clients struggle[0]

[0]: http://yuba.stanford.edu/~nickm/papers/Confused_Timid_and_Un...

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Re:VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos by tw04 on Monday April 06, 2015 @04:21PM (#9330491)

They should probably snipe the guys who wrote the players for one of the major porn sites then. They seem to have it figured out.

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