Found this dusty antique from the days when video players would let you buffer. If only this were still a thing.

The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website to Antique Memes Roadshow@lemmy.world – 321 points –

Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?

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HTML5 made video a first class citizen of your browser and buffering is handled automatically now 🙂

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Audio_and_video_delivery/buffering_seeking_time_ranges

Oh! I just assumed they were trying to save $ on all those looong "___ 10 hr version" videos or something.

It's both. Buffering the whole video was a waste of bandwidth and the changes for HTML5 means they could get away with lowering the buffering limit without destroying everyone's viewing experience.

For longer videos, a lot of people will stop watching before the video ends. A lot of bandwidth is wasted by buffering the entire video when the user is only going to watch 50% of it. To save bandwidth, sites like YouTube only buffer a tiny bit at a time.

I'm guilty of this. I'll queue up long music mix or ambient videos and just leave them going.

I meant something like opening a two hour long podcast and only listening to 30-60 minutes before closing the tab or switching to a different video. With the old functionality and current internet speeds, it likely would have buffered the entire video in only a few minutes. It could have wasted multiple GB of bandwidth.

I'll open dozens of 15-45min videos, watch a few to completion, close the rest after watching a tiny bit or nothing at all.

You should add them to a Playlist to save them for later

you're not gonna believe this

so I used to make a new set in the bookmarks folder, then I pull all the current tabs into the new set, then I never watched it ever again
there are probably ~400 links in that YouTube Sets folder

Tf thats kind of autistic I used to have a similar problem but I try to keep the list down to like 10-20 cuz be honest if you were truly interested in all 400 of those videos you'd be watching them anyways.

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YouTube still buffers video?

What he means is that, in olden days, videos would just keep buffering until the whole video was loaded. Now it's only at most the next ~1min, no more. You were able to see the grey bar thingie go all the way to the end.

i think its cus a 4k 60hz video would brick anyones ram

Especially since some companies are still pushing out computers with only 16MB of RAM in 2023, even a Gameboy emulator would almost max that out.

Did you mean GB? I can only assume so. They had Gameboy emulators before we even got to 1GB of RAM so I'm not really sure what you're talking about on that front either.

No one is producing computers with 16MB of ram that are meant to watch videos. Some laptops are still being made with ~2gb RAM. And some computers (in a different sense of the word) are currently being made with less than 32 kb of ram.

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If you think that was bad, you never tried to download porn on a BBS with a 2400 baud modem.

I am sure there are a few plugins you can use to make it work again.