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Comment by _jomo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how YouTube estimates the proper video quality for your internet connection, but they're definitely doing it wrong. I have a 150 Mbps connection and I can watch Full HD videos without buffering. This was already the case on my old 16k connection but in both cases YouTube defaults to 480p. This is really annoying and I always end up setting it to the highest quality.

Another problem seems to be YouTube's player that just sometimes stops to play although the video is completely loaded, or you try to skip or go back a few seconds and it just stucks completely.

Luckily I found this Firefox extension that just uses the native player and allows me to use high quality by default:

https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere

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It starts at 480p but quickly ramps up. Netflix works the same way. Start quickly and ramp up quality until the connection can't support any higher.

Try letting it play for a bit and you'll notice everything get sharper. Especially in full screen.

I find this to be a worse user experience. I would rather wait the 5-10 seconds for the high quality stream to buffer than have every video look really crappy for the first minute, then slowly get better. I guess I'd prefer a consistent experience overall. I stopped watching Netflix on my TiVo and switched to only watching it on my AppleTV because of issues like this.

You're in the minority: https://gigaom.com/2012/11/09/online-viewers-start-leaving-i...

The results of this study can be explained by 2 plausible hypotheses:

* Users have been trained to expect that if a random site spins the beach ball for a few seconds it's unlikely to get better. Akamai customers are a mixed set of smaller web sites, and these often have an "eternal progress meter" as failure mode of video players.

* Viewers in the Akamai mix are impatient because content includes a lot of emailed links, and ancillary (eg news article related) content

Neither of these would apply to Netflix and Youtube

So would I, but my guess is that, like me, you were stuck with dialup long ago. It drives me crazy when I can't pause a video to let it buffer anymore, but knowing at least one other person like me might help. :)

I don't really mind. The first 10-15 seconds of most stuff is just studio logos and the like anyway.

Apple TV does the same thing, except for some reason it starts high, and then drops down if necessary. During heavily congested times of day on Comcast, I would find myself starting at 1080p and then two seconds in freeze and drop down significantly.

And thanks to dash, even when you seek back to the beginning, it won’t reload it properly. So either the video just breaks, or the first 10 seconds are forced in 360p. Or, sometimes, it just breaks, but clicking ten times on the 0-mark somehow lets it play again.

DASH is annoying as hell.

https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki

Use this to turn off dash playback. And also just download the video instead of watching it in browser.

These are site-specific implementation issues, and have nothing to do with the DASH ISO standard.

There's an account setting to turn off high-quality video. Check to make sure you have it set to "off"

https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

It doesn't do anything for me, at least.

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