Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect you’re right, but on the other hand, I think it’s useful to think critically about whether starting the video faster is worth it if it makes the web page that it’s embedded in load slower. The “every millisecond counts” argument applies to the web page too. If the user bounces off the web page, they won’t get to the video anyway.

Also, maybe it’s fine if people don’t want to play the video? Personally, I appreciate it when a web page includes a summary, so that I can avoid watching a video. (I prefer not using YouTube for anything other than listening to music or occasionally watching a movie.)

Video can be a useful tool, but consider whose interest it’s in for you to encourage your audience to watch more TV. Is it really serving your users?

Even when I do want to watch a video, it’s selective. One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

> One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

Theater mode (shortcut 't') is a bit better. But yes, I too would like a mode where the video fills the whole browser window.

If I’m watching a video longer than 10 minutes or so I usually use a Firefox popout window.

Its the nature of the beast. For a while I used a custom ublock filter to strip out the recommended videos section, the comments, whatever I considered junk pixels. Now I just pull the video to /tmp/ and don't have to deal with buffering (somehow still an issue in 2024).

Use an external video player. mpv and VLC are my usual go-to's. Both will stream straight from a URL (and both handle far more than just YT).

You can also of course download and play at your leisure with ytdlp.

<https://mpv.io/>

<https://www.videolan.org/vlc/>

<https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>

I just tried VLC.

Media - From Network Stream - pasted Youtube URL.

Nope, error message, said check the logs.

Searched the UI for an entry for the logs, found nothing.

Googled for "vlc logs". Found a guide. Configured the path to be on the desktop.

Restarted VLC.

Tried again, same error message.

No log file created and of course no log file entries.

The joys of FOSS.

I tried the same route, but got the logs correctly. It gave me a HTTP 410 error. I wouldn't be surprised at all if VLC's youtube plugin is just too old and there's a better one somewhere else. But in the meanwhile, mpv's plugin works (if you're using yt-dlp and not youtube-dl, that is)

Logs not being directly visible in the VLC UI and not having a default log file location plus the fact that even going to advanced settings and configuring things doesn't make logs show up after the first try is not Google's fault, though.

It's hardly a fault though. And if you need this feature go ahead and implement it.

The first part is a feature, the second one is a bug.

And no, I don't think I will, I'll just use Youtube with ad blockers for as long as I can.

Despite having defended FOSS and advocated VLC ... I understand your viewpoint here. Calling on people to contribute bugfixes isn't especially realistic. Filing a bug on the fact that VLC has poor debug/log tools would be helpful though.

Particularly as a useful logging / debugging capability should enable more useful bug reports specific to function.

Sorry it's not working out for you, thanks for trying regardless.

I'm just jaded at this point. FOSS won the battle and lost the war. It's been subsumed into the bowels of these corporations that are ending up mega predatory.

TBH I almost always use mpv or ytdl these days.

I've used VLC successfully in the past on Android using the "stream" option. When I want to view video (as opposed to just listen to audio, my usual Android mpv use-case) that's delivered joy. On MacOS, I'll use mpv to play either audio only or video, with joy in both cases.

Don't forget that the other side of the equation is YouTube ACTIVELY WORKING TO BREAK COMPATIBILITY, and with considerable success. E.g., Invidious and Piped had been b0rk3n for a few months, though on checking again in the past few days, Invidious at least seems to be working again. So placing the whole burden on FOSS devs is at best exceedingly biased criticism. Those are in fact your friends, not Google.

> One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

The F key is your friend. It puts the video full screen. You don't even have to find the full screen icon at the bottom right of the video, just hit F.

But I don’t want full screen, I want it to take up the full window that I have allocated to the browser, while still allowing me to multitask in other windows.

I love Firefox's picture-in-picture mode for this exact reason. I think there is an extension for Chrome also.

It's in Chrome natively. But in Youtube you have to right click on the video twice.

First to trigger the Javascript context menu, and again to trigger the native one which will have the "Picture in picture" option. And there are actually two different native context menus, so if the PiP one doesn't pop up, you might have to try multiple times.

Very weird UX instead of just giving us a PiP button under the video.

It’s not weird UX when you consider why it’s so hidden: to increase “engagement” metrics (i.e. make it more likely for you to click on other videos, view/interact with ads/etc). Same reason the feature is unavailable on iOS (even though it’s been natively supported by the OS for years), unless you pay whatever google wants for a premium YouTube subscription.

There’s a great app called PiPifier, which allows you to use PiP for free on iOS.

That behaviour is so weird that it feels like an oversight. It's like we're not supposed to be able to access those options at all. A lot of people are explaining it by saying PIP mode lowers engagement so they hide it. But then why have that as a built in feature at all?

Maybe try the T key for theater mode!

You can make firefox fullscreen _within the window_ by changing a flag in about:config ... full-screen-api.ignore-widgets (set to true)

then, when you press `F` on a video, you will remove all firefox 'decoration', just like fullscreen mode, but it'll respect whatever position and size you have set for the browser.

That's a truly excellent tip, I definitely need to go tweak that setting.

As an additional tip, if you want to get rid of the "You are now fullscreen" (or whatever it says) that comes across the top... you can set the following to 0

  full-screen-api.transition-duration.enter
  full-screen-api.transition-duration.leave
  full-screen-api.transition-duration.timeout
  full-screen-api.warning.delay
  full-screen-api.warning.timeout

these are all involved in the popup when you fullscreen a video

What a wonderful but bizarrely named feature flag. Thank you!

For me, this extension works quite well https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bettertheatre...

this is my greatest nitpick.

Any website with a video player should include a "full window" control

Windowed - floating Youtube/every website' avail for firefox or chrome. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/windowed/ https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/windowed-floating-y...

Why not load the minimal required content for it to look right first (e. g. thumbnail, video controls) and load everything else once the rest of the page has been loaded (e. g. buffer the first few seconds of the video), somewhat similar to hydration?

I suspect that’s what they do already. The trouble is that it’s heavyweight speculative execution that often doesn’t pay off, but it wastes resources anyway.

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