Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?

    • 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.

              • Acters@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I have replaced so many hard drives with solid state drives when the complaint is slow computer. the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape. So yeah, there is reason to believe that many people out there buy cheap stuff only for them to need to upgrade for more money in the near future or they live with the slow unfit for the task hardware.

                Yeah, it is bad practice to use up bandwitdh with unneeded downloads when the user is there for short periods or watches small parts or one time. There are plenty of users on pay as you go plans or their infrastructure is slow and limited capacity that we call metered lines. These metered lines can be a last resort reduncy line for network stability. I have seen clients add a wireless line that is cheap to keep active, but they pay for the amount of data used.

                I think the end of buffering the whole large content stream is a good thing. I believe you can add an extension to Firefox that allows for video content to be fully buffered if you want to.

                • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape.

                  The real problem here is Windows. I’ve seen Windows thrash spinning rust disks continuously for hours and hours until I shut it off. I put Linux on there to see what happens and it’s happy as an otter with a clam.

                  • Acters@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    I can’t stop these people from making terrible choices. Corporations want to reach everyone as possible but for profit, so I promise its mostly the ads that take a hefty toll on their machines.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.