Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?

      • skulblaka@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • DreamySweet@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Azzu@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

          • Acters@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Some people’s internet and hard drives would be crippled by this. It’s to promote multitasking mostly. There are ways to download videos that I won’t get into, but it is possible if you desperately want to buffer the whole video. I do think it’s stupid to lock offline video downlaods behind a subscription paywall, but I am small fry and will do what I can.

            • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Not at all. If your hard drive would get crippled by a few GBs then I don’t know what to tell you. When the playback is stopped, and the application closed, then the temporary files are discarded.

              The argument about bandwidth usage is accurate though. I didn’t make sense to buffer the whole video when it might not be watched anyways.