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YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

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Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#151

Post by jiggawatts »

sofixa wrote: post #126
jiggawatts wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles. They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it! If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you. If you call their support, they'll ga…

> Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out Did they? Both Prime Video and Disney+ have very very narrow subtitle and audio language choices. > If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright…

Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly.

Are you saying it's some sort of challenge beyond the abilities of a Senior Technical Lead with total comp in the seven digits to figure out how to make a list of items more than 4 or 5 entries long? Too many megabytes of JSON to shove down the wire for more?

> Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?

They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire translations work. You pay someone to translate your shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No weird region-locked silliness.

You can make other languages appear by changing the entire UI language of Netflix, which then shows some other "data driven" subset of the subtitle languages.

But then, the entire UI is in another language, which not everyone watching may understand.

Essentially there are audio-subtitle language combinations that are impossible to achieve, no matter what. That combo may not be common enough to make any top-5 list anywhere.

So if you love someone of a sufficiently small minority, or have an unusual racial makeup in your household, Netflix would rather you weren't so weird.

Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They wrote the code to do this.

Blows my mind.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#152

Post by kristopolous »

legends2k wrote: post #129
kristopolous wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it works. Good engineering isn't about being obtuse and convoluted, it's about making stuff that works.

Using an idle timer, like window: requestIdleCallback [1], is good engineering. If anything passes that's not good engineering, it's laziness. I'm not even a JS programmer but I know about timers, idle wait in UI programming is a common pattern. It's the attitude of mediocre engineers not bothering to lookup or learn new things. If every OS/browser/stock market dev did what they want "because it works" we don't have…

Nah, then it doesn't work.

"It works" is The high engineering bar and it's the hard one to hit.

Oftentimes it's replaced these days with imagined complexity, ideological conformity or some arbitrarily defined set of virtues and then you get a really complicated thing that maybe works some of the time and breaks in really hard to understand ways.

Transcompiled frameworks inside of microservices talking to DBMS adapters over virtual networks to do a "select *" from a table and then pipe things in the reverse direction to talk to a variety of services and providers with their own APIs and separate dependencies sitting in different microservices as it just shepherds a JSON string through a dozen wrapper functions on 5 docker containers to just send it back to the browser is The way things are done these days. This is the crap that passes for "proper" engineering. Like the programming version of the pre-revolutionary French Court.

A simple solution, fit for purpose, that works as intended, easy to understand, remove, debug and modify with a no-bus factor, that's the actual high end solution, not the spaghetti stacked as lasagna that is software haute couture these days.

Sometimes, in practice, the dumb solution can also be the smart one. True mastery is in what you choose Not to do.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#153

Post by Jensson »

progval wrote: post #63
throwaw12 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, this kind of things are not done by engineers. * Marketing/Sales asks engineers to add a feature flag to sleep N milliseconds for their research: "how slowing down impacts your revenue" * engineer adds a flag, with different control parameters * Some genius in Product figures this out and updates the experiment to slow down for competitors When company gets a backlash from public: "oops, we forgot to clean up a…

"oops" https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Google stopped testing stuff in Firefox, that is all they did afaik. We all should know how many bugs and "oppsies" you get when you don't test before releasing new features. Test code snippets being pushed to prod etc.

Engineers tend to create paper trails on what they work on, code reviews and bug logs etc are everywhere, so I doubt there is any of those where they say "Make things shit for Firefox to hurt our competitors", that would net them an easy loss in court. But not testing in browsers with small userbases will hold in court.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#154

Post by t43562 »

Software that's not getting any attention will be ok as it won't get python upgrades.

Software that is getting attention has a nice long warning period and fixes may not even cause any trouble at all if the code is ok and there are unit tests.

New software won't have a whole class of timezone problems because people will use the better API to remove the warnings.

I cannot see what the big problem is - much more troublesome things happen in Go all the time. Python isn't a huge for-profit company like Google or even MS which has to dedicate efforts to ensuring that games from 1992 still run in 2023.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#155

Post by kuerbel »

jiggawatts wrote: post #90
CapsAdmin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p. Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser unti…

Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles. They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it! If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you. If you call their support, they'll ga…

I don't know about browser options, but on the android app I can choose between 7 different audio languages and 29 subtitles. Looked it up just for you with an episode of "The good Doctor", which is not a netflix original. I live in Germany. Definitely not an UI issue.

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#156

Post by gear54rus »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #132
ayhanfuat wrote: post #3

From reddit discussion ( https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/comment/k9... ): > To clarify it more, it's simply this code in their polymer script link: > setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); > which doesn't do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/96766c85/jsbin/desktop_pol...

That is not correct. The surrounding code gives some more context: h=document.createElement("video");l=new Blob([new Uint8Array([/* snip */])],{type:"video/webm"}); h.src=lc(Mia(l));h.ontimeupdate=function(){c();a.resolve(0)}; e.appendChild(h);h.classList.add("html5-main-video");setTimeout(function(){e.classList.add("ad-interrupting")},200); setTimeout(function(){c();a.resolve(1)},5E3); return m.return(a.promise)})}…

[flagged]

Re: YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox

#157

Post by nusl »

jiggawatts wrote: post #90
CapsAdmin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p. Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser unti…

Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles. They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it! If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you. If you call their support, they'll ga…

A common thing where I live is for local companies to buy streaming rights for Netflix-created media, and then we can't watch Netflix-created media on Netflix because local-company bought streaming/playback rights. Netflix doesn't care about the customer. They care about money, and that won't change. They'll max out the bullshit until customers push back, leave it there for a bit, wait for customers to get used to the new-bullshit, then add more bullshit and repeat.
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