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Google Video Quality Report

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Re: Google Video Quality Report

#61
post #9
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

^this. Same with Netflix though for me. Where are you based? I'm in Austin, Tx. Any of the speed tests online will report 30mbps/5mbps, but I'm unable to stream HD on Youtube or Netflix during peak times.

At peak times it isn't out of the question that the video service itself is a bit under the weather. I've had some troubles with Amazon at peak time, and it's always been with fresh content, such as yesterday's television show that just became available on Amazon four hours ago. It wasn't obviously my network, as switching over to Netflix worked just fine at full quality. (That's not a proof it's not still somehow network related, but it strongly suggests it wasn't my ISP.)

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#62
post #27

I'm unfamiliar with ISP scale networks - where is the actual bottleneck for them? One of the large ISPs in the UK is Virgin, and they have their own fibre network. They also throttle Youtube. Is there only so much data that can go down a fibre line? Is it the routers (I'm not sure if calling them routers is correct?) that lie between the main backbone and the network connecting a street/apartment? Is it the hardware…

Traffic inside your network come free of cost of course except for your own bandwidth constraints, but once you need to communicate with other networks that's where you start to pay.

Google offers free interconnections, but sometimes you can't just connect directly to Google and have to go through backbones that are owned by private companies.

So ISPs need to create as many interconnections as possible with other networks to decrease their costs, invest in their own infrastructure and pay for everything their network can't reach directly.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#63

Good step but in the absence of true competition between ISPs this does little for the end user. I can discover that my connection is bad, and then what?

Frontier mysteriously got better after the FCC publicly shamed them, although it could have been a coincidence.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#65
post #59
post #38

Is it me, or is this website subtly paying homage to Sen. Ted Stevens' famous "Series of Tubes" anti-net-neutrality speech.

People talked about Internet "pipes" for many years, but somehow Stevens was a moron for saying "tubes".

He wasn't a moron for saying "tubes". We was a moron for the extended, stammering, rambling and incomprehensible context he used that word in.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#66
post #15
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

I think Comcast is doing the same thing here in Colorado. Lately, I've been seeing quality drop in videos where it shouldn't. Running speed tests or downloading from newsgroups I'm hitting 60mbps.

Same here for Comcast in Seattle. From 6-8pm I can't stream youtube on anything more than 360p or it buffers constantly.

Other video streaming services seem to stream fine (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video) and speedtest.net reports 56Mbps down, it's just youtube that suffers.

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#67
post #3

Good. I swear youtube is throttled by Time Warner Cable for me. I stream Netflix, Hulu, etc and never have problems with them. I can confirm that I'm getting my speeds of 20MBit/s down, and yet almost every video on YouTube buffers. If I use youtube-dl to download the video, I can confirm that my actual connection speed is somewhere around 60KB/s. If I then use youtube-dl on my VPS with the same video, I get somewher…

I have TWC and have had a lot of success in speeding up Youtube by blocking access to the caching servers that TWC uses.

If I block 206.111.0.0/16, I can stream at full speed.

See: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13kmvd/have_time...

Re: Google Video Quality Report

#70
I was really hoping this was going to address the seeking problem. It seems like whenever I want to seek, even backwards to already buffered content, there's a 50/50 chance the video player will stop working entirely and force me to do a refresh and lose my entire video buffer.
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