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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

Too bad they can't get rid of DASH, because DASH is the real problem behind buffering, jerky playback and other nonsense. I really strongly dislike how bad the video playback experience is and has been for quite some time on YouTube.

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It completely breaks fast forward and rewind. Why do they even leave the playback indicator interactive if it's going to cause the video to re-buffer every time you even look at it funny?

I watch a lot of youtube these days and when I'm sub'ed to a channel, I shouldn't have to deal with buffering just to skip excessively long intros that I've seen for the 50th time.

I agree it's annoying. In its effort to save seconds of bandwidth from each video, Google has made everyone's Youtube experience worse.

Fine, don't load the whole video ahead of time, but can you just load the first say 30 seconds? Or maybe even - and I know this is going to sound crazy - a whole minute ahead of time?

I remember a time when it seemingly didn't load even 5 seconds ahead of time. That's just ridiculous. Fire the bean counters who are in charge of that short-sighted idea.

I remember a time when the flash player loaded the entire video to a temp file and you could just go through /proc/$firefox-pid/fds, find it and dump the video that way.

Pretty sure I still have a bash script laying around to automate this process.

The behavior is different for different resolution videos I think. Instead of seconds, I think they download x kilobytes ahead of time. Just try 360p vs 1080p (for same video).

YouTube's playback latency is critical. If users have to wait for the video to buffer, they are more likely to close the tab and do something else.

It's a limit on how much it buffers while playing. It does not improve the playback experience in any way, and causes significant degradation when you seek the video.

DASH is purely an XML format for describing server-side content. The issues you are describing have nothing to do with DASH and are due to implementation decisions in both the JS player and the underlying MSE object.

The YouTube Center plugin for Firefox and Chrome allows you to disable DASH.

It's been removed from the Chrome Web Store though, so installing it on Chrome on Windows is a pain. Still on AMO for Firefox users though.

I am not sure why anything uses DASH, but the problem isn't just limited to it. Http video streaming is quite hard to do well, a lot of clients struggle[0]

[0]: http://yuba.stanford.edu/~nickm/papers/Confused_Timid_and_Un...

They should probably snipe the guys who wrote the players for one of the major porn sites then. They seem to have it figured out.

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