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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

There was a time when Netflix was young, and I had slow internet, that if you queued up a movie and then paused it, it would continue to load. So you'd pick a movie, queue it up (literally) and then go make snacks and get situated. When the bar looked long enough you'd start watching. Then if it stalled (which it would do like clockwork every evening around 8 pm) you'd take an intermission.

By the time I got stuck with slow internet again (boycotting Comcast), they had removed that feature and it really sucked. Now I have fiber and the only drama is around Netflix only allowing you to stream a couple movies at once.

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Of course, you could spring for the high capacity Netflix plan.

Alas, I bought a new TV just before 4K was a thing. It saved me the temptation of buying one while they were so expensive. The HD level is good enough for me.

Yes, back when things actually buffered properly on the internet. The way YouTube buffers now: not actually loading more than a few seconds of the video ahead of where I'm watching, even when it KNOWS my internet is spotty, really frustrates me.

You could install the YouTube Plus browser extension and check "disable DASH playback" in the settings. Then if you start playing a video for a second or two and pause it, it will buffer the entire thing. The only downside is I think it reduces the maximum video quality for all videos to 720p.

I have a 1920x1200 monitor, so yeah I don't think so lol.

So do I and it's what I do. I can't really see much difference between 720p and 1080p on YouTube.

This drives me INSANE.

I'd rather let it buffer for 10 min, then watch it in 360p because you guys can't figure out your buffering. The same goes for netflix!

They try to match the resolution to your bandwidth. Sometimes that's the right solution, but not always. When the playback stalls right at the big reveal it can be painful, but that doesn't mean I want to watch the minecraft edition of the movie the whole time

And, as most things, I'd rather have the choice. If you want to default to auto-configured resolution, that's fine. But give me the choice to override if I want!

The sense I get is that it's an elaborate way to soften people up for abandoning their ISPs and going with Google Fiber. There's a whole system of alerts and pages for basically saying 'LOL ur internetz sux', and it's plausible to me that they'd get that in place in markets they've not currently entered yet.

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