Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 112 posts

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#71

Post by jlgaddis »

ams6110 wrote: post #19
revelation wrote: post #12

This is just one of the many fights surrounding net neutrality. We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation and bandwidth (even latency/routing) guarantees. The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. By any basic reasoning, an ISP that doesn't enable access to YouTube should be out of customers within a few months. Tha…

Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?

In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost.

Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead.

I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#72

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

voltagex_ wrote: post #26
randomfool wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ISP wanting money to install caching servers for Netflix and YouTube is not something which has been covered ny net neutrality in the past. It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers. That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.

I can't believe ISPs would fight free caching servers. I was happy when I saw traffic coming from somehost.myisp.net while loading content from YouTube.

Streaming video competes with Comcast's original and probably much higher profit product.

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#73

Post by jlgaddis »

belorn wrote: post #53
ams6110 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?

Several different options are available: We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits. Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being tol…

The FCC now dictates that all are ISPs must include a statement on their public websites detailing what types of filtering, rate-limiting, traffic shaping, etc., that they do (e.g. if they prioritize their own VoIP customers over Netflix or something), but I'm not sure that many providers do. Even most of the ones that do probably intentionally try to make it hard to find.

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#74

Post by jlgaddis »

Spittie wrote: post #16
epa wrote: post #2

While it may be true that there are some outstanding ISP issues that lead to slow internet, I think the more pressing issue is the behaviour of the new(ish) youtube player acting erratic. For instance, you cannot fully load a video anymore, it will only load a portion as you continue watching. If you wish to rewind the video, for some reason youtube will want you to rebuffer the entire from where you have rewinded to…

ViewTube: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011 It replaces the YouTube player with the standard html5 video player. This alone made my experience on YouTube way better. My connection is slow, so many times I'll just open a YouTube video in a background tab, and leave it loading for a while. With this, I can just preload the whole video. And seeking doesn't make the video reload. A side bonus, also, is that every…

Holy crap, thank you very much!

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#75

Post by jlgaddis »

chii wrote: post #24
zanny wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thing is amazing, thanks for the script link! My slow 1.5mbps Internet has had awful youtube experience since the player change. I have been downloading most of the videos directly to avoid using it.

how do you download the video? is it a browser plugin? I use chrome, and the old youtube downloader extension no longer works after their UI revamp (and the extension is no longer updated as far as i know).

I use "1-Click Youtube Video Downloader"[0] in Iceweasel on Debian unstable and it works great (it puts a "Download" button below the video between the Subscribe button and the number of views.

I've only used it a few times but it seems to work well. You can choose which video (resolution/quality) to download and then I usually watch 'em later using VLC.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1-click-youtu...

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#78

Post by aestra »

hobs wrote: post #70
kibibu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not allowed to sell my own body parts, does this mean they're not mine?

Depends on where and who you ask. There are definitely people who will take your body parts in sale. (Think iPhone craze + China and remember back to people selling kidneys.)

They said "allowed", organ sale is very illegal everywhere in the world except Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Current_Restriction...

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#79

Post by arbitrage »

Qantourisc wrote: post #45

The internet used to be ran by engineers. Now it's ran by suits ... The former does what needs to be done, and all pitch in to move traffic. Suits on the other hand only see $$$. As for the suits: either your are overselling your bandwidth and you don't have enough money to make the necessary changes REGARDLESS of where the traffic is going/coming from. Or your just being greedy ! To fight this, I think it's best to…

There's more to judge an ISP by than just raw speed.

Re: Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make and break online video

#80

Post by nitid_name »

skore wrote: post #42
_frog wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of issues with the new player. Even if you've buffered the video ahead, when you try to skip to a buffered segment the video starts loading again. On top of that I've had lots of issues where changing the video resolution just flat out doesn't work and greys out the option.

> Even if you've buffered the video ahead, when you try to skip to a buffered segment the video starts loading again. It makes no logical sense for the player to reload something that was already loaded since that would handily double their traffic (if only in this situation). Which makes me think they don't actually buffer anymore. The bar just shows a standard, imaginary amount of buffering by default and nobody re…

>Which makes me think they don't actually buffer anymore. The bar just shows a standard, imaginary amount of buffering by default and nobody really cares.

It makes me very uncomfortable how "true" that feels.

Post reply on HN