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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I hate watching 15 minutes of something at low quality because one TCP packet was dropped. Paranoia leads to the most user satisfaction ("at least the show didn't freeze") but I would rather buffer the thing locally and watch in uninterrupted 4k @ 50Mbps or whatever. (Also, what's the point of gigabit internet if I can't watch a measly 50Mbps stream?)

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Most players that use adaptive bit rate allow you to set it at a constant one instead, with the buffering and all.

I feel the same way and often click a specific rendition and then let it buffer locally.

But Netflix (which GP was talking about implicitly by the comment they replied to) doesn't.

Sure, but Netflix uses HLS, I assume, and doesn't have segments that are 15 minutes in length. So if you did drop a tcp packet, you're more likely to have lower quality for 10-20 seconds, not 15 minutes.

HLS to Safari/iOS and Dash to everything else.

Sure, if you wanna pay the DASH tax to a hundred patent holders. DASH doesn't even really hold much of a technological benefit anymore now that their's finally a standard for HLS-LL.

>Also, what's the point of gigabit internet if I can't watch a measly 50Mbps stream?

Just because your connection is "gigabit" doesn't mean everything in between is gigabit

Nor does it mean that you haven't happened to have a hit a very busy sending server[farm|datacenter]

Buffferbloat is a thing - and it's not [generally] good

> what's the point of gigabit internet if I can't watch a measly 50Mbps stream?)

Revenue from ricer "networkophiles", like the audiophiles before them.

At least packet loss and ping stability can be measured, unlike "sounds fuller".

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