Earlier quoted context omitted.
The benefit of the doubt... that corps _don't_ write clunky, slow software?
When the supposed to bug happens to conveniently cause issues for adblocker users, yeah.
Possible, but still just an assumption.
Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
71–80 of 133 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#72If you have an adblocker it might be intentional.
That's not plausible. If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker." When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change. In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that…
I find it fascinating that people think 12 seconds armchair psychology is enough to definitively rule out phenomena that hinge on complex tech and complex human deliberations about policy. That works on campy monster of the week TV shows but it catastrophically underestimates real world complexity.
We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits for adblock users, not to mention the cat and mouse game of breaking scraper-oriented tools like Newpipe. So it's happened before, and on-the-ground evidence of historical precedent and a straight look at incentives tell us more than assumed psychological states.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#73It's probably the special Google hardware obsoleting sauce called AV1. Without hardware acceleration your computer will struggle to decode their videos.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incompetence is by definition not intentional, and sabotage is the action of a rogue employee, not corporate strategy. A corporation can't intentionally sabotage itself , by definition.
They're sabotaging non-Chrome browsers to drive people toward their platform with the strategically weakened extension API.
I don't think that has any connection to the subject under discussion, which is about whether YouTube CPU performance would lead people to turn off adblockers. Not about getting people to switch to Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not plausible. If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker." When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change. In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that…
I find it fascinating that people think 12 seconds armchair psychology is enough to definitively rule out phenomena that hinge on complex tech and complex human deliberations about policy. That works on campy monster of the week TV shows but it catastrophically underestimates real world complexity. We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits fo…
Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine didn't say anything about psychology.
But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled."
That makes sense as a strategy, telling the user what to change. Silently using up more CPU doesn't.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#76Somewhat relevant: can somebody share good mpv defaults (or some other interesting technique) for playing YT videos? I have managed to get it to work, but it still pauses a lot for bufferring. I wonder if there's maybe some yt-dlp, ffmpeg, etc. trick to pre-cache some segments or something like that. The reason to play it in mpv is not to avoid commercials (I have a paid account), but because I can then play it from…
Either download ahead, or turn down the bitrate via ytdl format expressions; see the latter's docs for how to express your desires.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given their actions the last two years or so unfortunately the default assumption is (reasonably) “probably something intentional to get people to stop doing something they don’t want, like using ad blockers.”
Sometimes it's just browser GPU driver issues.
Very well could be. But with companies like Google I immediately start from a place of light-cynicism until I see evidence to the contrary at this point. I haven't given them the benefit of the doubt in probably a decade, and generally it's a fair way to go about things.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#78Also: Recently my videos "goes full black" for few milliseconds (not matter which way to see them, but yt is where I noted it more). I'm on M3, and can't pin point a reason.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#79Also: Recently my videos "goes full black" for few milliseconds (not matter which way to see them, but yt is where I noted it more). I'm on M3, and can't pin point a reason.
It happens when you use adblocker
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
#80Youtube has been turning on AV1 for 1080p content for me. My phone is the only device with an AV1 hardware decoder. The impact on battery life and CPU usage has been extreme.
You can tell Youtube to prefer AV1 only for low-quality videos (https://www.youtube.com/account_playback) or you can install an extension that will force h264 playback where supported.
Other playback features such as ambient mode and volume equalisation can also impact performance, though that kind of depends on how fast your web browser is at executing Javascript, and to a much smaller extent.
The substantial bandwidth savings are here to stay, though, so in time I think Youtube will move to AV1 more often.