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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

This is something that I run into a lot. It's just nicer being able to click a file and play in VLC that's more responsive, can fastforward/rewind, play at different speeds, etc.

Streaming through webpages just isn't that great for how I consume video.

EDIT: I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.

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> EDIT: I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.

THANK YOU <3.

I didn't know! I was aware that I could open video streams (the old-school kind) in VLC, but I never realized it can pull a stream from YouTube video link. I see now it works great, though the video quality option is not obviously available. It can be set here:

http://www.techverse.net/play-youtube-videos-vlc-media-playe...

From the page, under disadvantages of streaming YouTube through VLC:

  Disadvantage
     No annotations.

Like hell. It's totally an advantage. Annotations on YouTube are a total mess, and they're their worst invention, even worse than their comment section, infamous for low-quality content.

I absolutely hate streaming videos in the browser. It's a stupid idea. Everyone uses a different player, half of them can't handle rewinding or skipping forward, and all of them are total resource hogs. There are things that really shouldn't be done with web technologies. Like spreadsheets, or video players. They work best if made native.

Annotations / subtitles have their uses. For example, watch this[1] and choose "English (Movie Titles)" as the subtitle and you can figure out which movies all of the clips come from.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

That's quite clever. Most of them are "BUY THIS" or "MY OTHER VIDEO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

> Like hell. It's totally an advantage. Annotations on YouTube are a total mess, and they're their worst invention, even worse than their comment section, infamous for low-quality content.

Ugh, I hate them. Specially when they aren't set to last a specific time and are there the whole video. I instantly deactivate them when I see them.

Netflix has really good compression though. Torrenting takes hours, makes the internet unusable in the whole house, and the quality is much worse. Netflix just works, even if multiple people are using it. And it goes straight to the TV.

You should probably either tune your wireless AP (increase max connections, decrease linger time) or change ISP. Torrenting should absolutely not make the internet unusable.

There are so many dead simple technical solutions to this I can't fathom someone on HN not being able to find any of them.

1. QOS on the router, set a lower priority for the ports torrents use 2. Set a bandwidth limit in your torrent client 3. Use a queue / batch system to have them download at 3AM or whatever.

I have no access to the router. Of course I know how to throttle bandwidth or schedule it later. My point is that it's far less convenient than just streaming instantly from Netflix.

no true scotsman

not sure why i got downvoted on this. instead of being a helpful post, the parent posted a deriding no true scotsman fallacy.

Modem QoS can fix this

You’re not wrong! But to continue upon those advocating QoS adjustments: A good router (I love my Apple router) and better Internet (oddly… I can’t complain about the actual Comcast service I have) make these problems go away, assuming you nab a high-enough quality torrent.

This is all about how much control you want and the tradeoffs.

Streaming allows for instant start and adaptive bandwidth. Downloading means you can play it in whatever way you want, watch just the scenes you like, etc.

Netflix has a great UI for simple watching or you can use a full featured player and tweak lots of settings.

Also there are plenty of ways to play anything on a TV (smart tv with usb drive, network share, chromecast, htpc software, dlna) and you can use settings in your torrent client to limit the download speed if necessary. Some clients even let you torrent the file sequentially so you can start playing/streaming it before it's all finished.

> Torrenting takes hours, makes the internet unusable in the whole house, and the quality is much worse.

You may have results like this, but I would guess that you're in the minority.

For me personally, well seeded 6-8GB movie takes an hour at most, usually less. I can still play online games, watch other streams online, browse, etc. and with other people using the same internet connection in the house doing the same things, and not have any noticeable slowdown. Full 1080p with AAC or DTS audio seems like higher quality to me than what Netflix provides.

The only upside Netflix has is the instant streaming, but if you're patient and can wait a bit for some downloads, or maybe run them at night or while at work, then this is a non-issue. Also you can just connect a TV to your computer.

I've moved around a lot, I would say your experience is in the minority.

in most torrent clients, you can adjust transfer speeds and number of connections... of course that won't make torrent transfer go faster but it may make your Internet connection usable again.

Does your internet suck? Because that isn't how it is at all.

I'm uploading 2 torrents right now at almost a megabit and my internet is just fine.

When there are good seeders I can pull 8 down. Most movies and shows are done in minutes.

No noticeable degradation to browsing speed, when a large file finishes there can be a little slowdown, but that's a different thing.

Your connection is only unusable if you don't cap the upload rate in your torrent client to below your total upload capacity, so that you leave some room for ACKs to be sent.

Or, you can just get a seedbox or VPS with a decent connection close enough to you that you can stream off it. The torrent will be done near instantaneously, and you'll be able to stream in higher quality than Netflix. You can stream full 1080P MKVs at <20Mbps.

Use private trackers as they're much better seeded, as well as the more obvious benefits.

Torrenting is wicked fast for me. I don't do it very often, but when I do they download way faster than realtime. Usually something like a 22 minute TV episode will be done in 5 minutes.

Obviously torrenting requires slightly more "technical" knowledge and procedure than Netflix, but I certainly don't find it slow or low quality, and it has never made my Internet unusable.

And with a bit of extra work (very little, really) you can have a ridiculously nice torrenting setup. I can just add a movie to my IMDb watchlist and it will be on my TV in 15 minutes. And 10GB+ h264 Blu-ray encodes are much better quality than Netflix streaming (I can't vouch for their 4k streams, but I reckon they're still much lower bitrate).

So if the highest quality was a paid for service, would you pay for it - I suspect not.

If the best service (which for me involves quality, selection, and convenience) was a paid service, and was somewhat reasonably priced, I suspect I would pay for it. I don't know exactly what "reasonably priced" would mean, but for the record I do buy a decent amount of music, mostly through iTunes, because I think it generally provides a better service than torrenting.

Ok I get it, everyone has faster internet than me. All I'm saying is that Netflix works fine even with my apparently shitty internet, but torrenting isn't great. I do torrent stuff occasionally, but it just isn't as good or convenient.

I pay 15 Euro for 100Mbit with no data caps. Torrenting takes minutes, elementary QoS gets the job done for ensuring browsing is ok and 1080p H.264 is hard to beat.

The few torrents that use x265 look great at about 200MB for 60 minutes of 720p.

Expect more of that in the future.

> I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.

Same goes for mpv. DRMed distributors (like Netflix) and their players are just a major usability handicap. Let the age of legal DRM-free video begin (because pirates have been enjoying it for years already). One can hope.

The exception being for living room content. I could probably set up my spare desktop to play on my TV in an afternoon, but Netflix on my PS3 is by far the easiest way to get content on the couch.

Nobody watches Netflix "streaming thru webpages"

I assume it meant streaming / watching shows via the Netflix website?

Well, at least I do on occasion. When the kids are watching Netflix cartoons on the living room TV, I can just open up Firefox and watch another show on my (Linux) PC.

I suspect most people won't use it, but I'm glad to have this option.

Firefox on Linux works with Netflix now? I though only Chrome worked on Linux due to the DRM Netflix uses.

I watch Netflix exclusively through their website — either on TV with my HTPC (Kodi with Chrome fullscreen) or on my computer. I don't own any devices that can run their Android or IOS apps.

Netflix wasn't mentioned, just streaming. And many people do stream through the website for netflix, hulu, youtube, amazon and the hundreds of other sites out there.

If that works for you then great, but there's obviously much more control available when you have the full file and your own player.

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