Is it just me, or does Youtube only load a certain amount of a video at once?

[Deleted]

Just noticed this a while ago, I pause a video to let it load...and it only goes about a tenth of the way of a 30 minute video.

Ehm...what's the point of this? I want a video to be loaded and ready to go and nobody has ever had an issue with it before, the ONLY benefit I see is to make it easier on YT's servers but honestly they must be IMMENSE anyway and could handle massive loading up until now.
What gives? :L

[Vortech]

Put it simply, it makes it easier for youtube to upload the information to you. If you've ever looked closely at your network usage, when you are watching a video you are downloading it in small intervals of high bandwidth. While this gives you no overall change in the amount downloaded over time it allows youtube to interleave uploading processes between multiple users.

Data streams are costly in terms of cpu performance and bandwidth. Larger less frequent packets are less strenuous.

[Picori]

I'm not sure why it does this now but this was changed a while ago, I think it loads like the next minute on a small clip and then a certain percentage on larger clips.

[chaud]

Most people never watch a video the entire way through, so only a small part is loaded to save bandwidth.

[This name sucks]

I always thought it was intelligent bandwidth prioritizing.

Obviously when you first load a page you get a big burst of it to get you the first few seconds of video instantly but after that point you ramp down to a rate where you get 1 second~ of video per second or whatever the algorithm decides it can spare, or if it needs to give some other person that initial burst.

[Deleted]

Mm, I just find it odd and rather annoying is all. For the last, what, decade? YT has loaded ENTIRE videos in one go for millions of people at once without an issue. And to add some salt in the wound, Virgin Media advertised I would never see a buffering logo again...yet here I am, buffering because only a fragment of the video is being loaded at once and it doesn't seem to load any more until I start buffering which is a royal pain.

[This name sucks]

Mm, I just find it odd and rather annoying is all. For the last, what, decade? YT has loaded ENTIRE videos in one go for millions of people at once without an issue. And to add some salt in the wound, Virgin Media advertised I would never see a buffering logo again...yet here I am, buffering because only a fragment of the video is being loaded at once and it doesn't seem to load any more until I start buffering which is a royal pain.

Virgin media has nothing to do with what youtube's server do.

Youtube hasn't been out for a decade.

Are you done yet?

[Deleted]

what's the point of this?

Because nobody, not even YouTube, wants to pay the massive bandwidth bills that result from video downloads. The point is very simply to save in bandwidth bills.

[This name sucks]

Because nobody, not even YouTube, wants to pay the massive bandwidth bills that result from video downloads. The point is very simply to save in bandwidth bills.

Actually, google has so many servers and fiber layed out for their own use, they pay almost nothing for bandwidth.

http://www.wired.com/business/2009/1...ube-bandwidth/

[Jinto]

Google does pay for the bandwidth. It may not pay it like a customer would pay an ISP (Google is an ISP itself). But it does exchange traffic with other ISPs. So the cost of bandwidth is in the equipment etc. Not to mention power bills. It is still in Google's interest to limit server load per user as much as possible.

[This name sucks]

Google does pay for the bandwidth. It may not pay it like a customer would pay an ISP (Google is an ISP itself). But it does exchange traffic with other ISPs. So the cost of bandwidth is in the equipment etc. Not to mention power bills. It is still in Google's interest to limit server load per user as much as possible.

It takes like 800 Joules for 1 search.

Google is extremely efficient, you just existing, passively breathing, organs working etc and otherwise being totally static for 1 second uses more energy

let me find the link for that.

[Jinto]

We are not talking about 1 search here but sending the contents of a Youtube video to your browser to be cached.

[Vortech]

We are not talking about 1 search here but sending the contents of a Youtube video to your browser to be cached.

Agreed, we aren't. I did some more thinking about the topic and it all boils down to efficiency for Youtube's servers. I could go into the extreme details about server and processor efficiency in regards to bandwidth context switching, but I'll just leave it at the simple fact that Youtube is able to process more information and upload more information to more users by loading small portions of your video at a time rather than giving you a constant data stream.

[TheRabidDeer]

Youtube hasn't been out for a decade.

This blew my mind. It feels like youtube has been out for so long... and yet its only been 7 years. And yet it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO hugely popular.

EDIT: Oh, and btw... youtube was not profitable for a very long time.

[This name sucks]

This blew my mind. It feels like youtube has been out for so long... and yet its only been 7 years. And yet it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO hugely popular.

EDIT: Oh, and btw... youtube was not profitable for a very long time.

Its still not exactly profitable even without any real bandwidth costs. Its finally broken even though.

I remember in like 2008 it was bleeding like 200m every month

[opera0tr]

I registed just so I could help with this topic ... nice can't talk about downloading youtube videos ... so I am just going to comment that i can't comment. I can say that I dont have this issue