While it may be true that there are some outstanding ISP issues that lead to slow internet, I think the more pressing issue is the behaviour of the new(ish) youtube player acting erratic. For instance, you cannot fully load a video anymore, it will only load a portion as you continue watching. If you wish to rewind the video, for some reason youtube will want you to rebuffer the entire from where you have rewinded to. This is terrible when dealing with slow connections. I have found that since youtube has implemented three specific things, 1) new player, 2) changing of related videos, 3) google account requirements, the user experience has gone way down hill.
There's a lot of issues with the new player. Even if you've buffered the video ahead, when you try to skip to a buffered segment the video starts loading again. On top of that I've had lots of issues where changing the video resolution just flat out doesn't work and greys out the option.
> Even if you've buffered the video ahead, when you try to skip to a buffered segment the video starts loading again.
It makes no logical sense for the player to reload something that was already loaded since that would handily double their traffic (if only in this situation).
Which makes me think they don't actually buffer anymore. The bar just shows a standard, imaginary amount of buffering by default and nobody really cares.
>Which makes me think they don't actually buffer anymore. The bar just shows a standard, imaginary amount of buffering by default and nobody really cares.
It makes me very uncomfortable how "true" that feels.
Their player has always been abysmal, from day one. I've noticed a lot of A/B testing for the player recently, as well, and some of the things they're trying out just don't even begin to make sense. It is turning the simple act of watching a video into a legitimately irritating experience.
Failing to load HD versions of the video and then graying them out (reloading the page usually makes it work again), play the video in 320p and display the resolution as set to HD, SD to HD loading ad infinitum (or just display an error and stop playback), stop buffering after skipping (even to pre-buffered parts), really low streaming speeds (that fix after reloading the page), etc, etc.
Making a general video host is so expensive and complicated that we may have to just resign to use YouTube for at least some more years... but it's easily one of the worst user experiences regarding online videos.
For longer stuff, and when I know I will likely skip back and forth, I use a browser extension to download the video as mp4, and then VLC to watch it while it's still downloading.. so much nicer.
> If you wish to rewind the video, for some reason youtube will want you to rebuffer the entire from where you have rewinded to.
Netflix does this too and it drives me nuts, especially when I'm watching something in HD because it automatically switches to low definition for a few seconds until the high definition version is loaded.
Not buffering the entire video has happened for a long, long time. Years. There's various browser extensions out there that can help you if you want them. The resolution selection is still weird, though, and jumping forward or backward to what look like buffered times is definitely annoying.
But the ISP makes a gigantic difference. I have the benefit of a great ISP (smallish in size, no surprise) and seeing all the youtube jokes about ads always working but not the videos themselves made me somewhat puzzled, as the very few times a video doesn't stream it's just as likely to be the ad that pauses as the main video, and that's super annoying because you can't skip ahead in an ad like you can the main video. I figured that other ISPs were worse, but there must be some exaggeration going on for comedic effect.
Then recently I was at my parent's house for a while, where they are on Time Warner. I really had no idea how unusable it could be. Constant pausing of video for loading every 20 seconds or so, waiting at the very beginning of almost every video, not knowing if a video was loading or there was some kind of error and the page needed to be refreshed.
I'm really used to checking youtube for how to do basic household tasks. Often you'll have to go through two or three to find a good video on a subject. You can't do that at all in that environment, as the waiting is just too much. I'd switch to 240p just to get the gist of a video to make sure I wanted to watch it, so definitely forget any movies you want to see with good quality video. I would queue up videos so at least something was buffered, which meant you have to plan ahead on what you want to watch, totally changing how you use the site.
It's really like a totally different product. I think of youtube as the wikipedia of home repair and cooking (or maybe more ehow or whatever, but the point is that it has an expert video for everything) and I also use it for constant mindless browsing and watching interesting talk after interesting talk, quickly deciding if something is worth watching within 30 seconds by scrubbing around in the video a few times. You can't use it for either of those things, and the desire to pull out your hair while waiting for anything else taints any other use, too.
If I was on that Time Warner connection, I wouldn't be making jokes about how ads always seem to buffer just fine, I would be completely puzzled how other people would think that Youtube was in any way worth using. It really felt like stepping back to dialup.
My connection isn't especially fast, but maybe my ISP does the local CDN thing. People should try it out, because I suspect the transition the other way would be closer to a religious experience, or like stepping out of a time machine. Meanwhile Googlers working on the youtube player might want to all get a Time Warner connection, as maybe designing for that (as opposed to more specific bandwidth or latency limitations) might make for a better player for the many suffering people out there.
I have TimeWarner as well in SE Wisconsin. Quite honestly I wouldn't describe YouTube w/ the "dial-up" badge; but this is probably a regional issue, at least in part.
I have their second-highest tier, 30Mbps down / 5Mbps up. The speeds I receive are pretty consistent, even during peak hours, according to speed tests.
I often find that YouTube will either work splendidly on my TWC connection, or it simply won't work at all. In other words: perhaps 80-90% of videos I can seek to a new spot in a 1080p video w/o any perceptible buffering... the other 10% of the time the video just refuses to load, or seeking is horribly broken, or it cuts off before the video is finished.
I guess I would agree that, for the videos that fail, YouTube _does feel_ like a different product.
(I should also add that, in my case, advertisements usually work even when the video fails to load.)
It replaces the YouTube player with the standard html5 video player. This alone made my experience on YouTube way better.
My connection is slow, so many times I'll just open a YouTube video in a background tab, and leave it loading for a while. With this, I can just preload the whole video.
And seeking doesn't make the video reload.
A side bonus, also, is that every video will use the html5 player, so making flash useless on YouTube (one of the few sites that make me keep flash installed). It will also remove the ads, so it might not be your thing for moral/ethical reasons.
This thing is amazing, thanks for the script link!
My slow 1.5mbps Internet has had awful youtube experience since the player change. I have been downloading most of the videos directly to avoid using it.
how do you download the video? is it a browser plugin? I use chrome, and the old youtube downloader extension no longer works after their UI revamp (and the extension is no longer updated as far as i know).
I have used Keepvid.com before, it is simple and works good. Sometimes it requires the use of an Applet (which seems very suspicious to me) so I deny it access.
Video-DownloadHelper[0] is also a good choice if you need to download videos often, and from different sources (e.g. blip.tv). However, it only works with Firefox. Jdownloader can also download Youtube Videos (and many others).
I use "1-Click Youtube Video Downloader"[0] in Iceweasel on Debian unstable and it works great (it puts a "Download" button below the video between the Subscribe button and the number of views.
I've only used it a few times but it seems to work well. You can choose which video (resolution/quality) to download and then I usually watch 'em later using VLC.
I've just installed this in Chrome and tried it on two videos and it is working great: the videos buffer quickly and seeking is fast and doesn't force a rebuffer. I've had problems with Firefox on YouTube, also trying the opt-in beta for the HTML5 player, but it didn't work. Cheers!
Do you have your cache for Flash video on Youtube set to unlimited, or more than 4kb or whatever the ridiculous default is? I changed mine a week ago in the flash settings (right click on a video) and entire videos load fine now.
This is driving me crazy. I've only a 1mbit connection, so I frequently used to pre-buffer as much as possible of a video. And I could watch the video without hitches and pauses at a good quality as it was already downloaded.
Moreover, the little that is prebuffered seems to behave oddly, you skip forward well within the indicated area that have been buffered, yet the player seems to reset and start re-downloading that part -> unueably slow.
Content is King. Youtube should be copying the model of local TV stations. Charge the cable companies for the privilege of accessing content. It shouldn't be reversed.
For things like YouTube, that could work, but if Netflix tried to do something like that the cable compaines would just start their own services for their customers instead (a la Verizon's Redbox Instant)
Except it doesn't work that way because nobody who uses Comcast knows that Comcast charges content providers for peering. If you use Comcast, then you aren't the customer, you're the product.
This is just one of the many fights surrounding net neutrality.
We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation and bandwidth (even latency/routing) guarantees. The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. By any basic reasoning, an ISP that doesn't enable access to YouTube should be out of customers within a few months. That this doesn't happen is testament to the broken market surrounding internet access, and a bad sign for the fights that await us.
(Google needs to start naming and shaming the ISPs that do not want to peer with them on reasonable conditions or with sufficient capacity when they detect bad performance on YouTube. They have been doing this locally, e.g. they delisted french news sites from Google News when these lobbied for protectionist laws, and they have been stating the parties that forbid them from showing copyrighted content, e.g. the GEMA in Germany.)
Providing internet service requires a lot of physical infrastructure, e.g. cables run to every home, all the attendant routing and switching gear, a fleet of trucks and maintenance workers available 24/7, etc. Right now the ISPs (phone and/or cable company) provides this. Are you saying that the physical infrastructure should be separated from the ISP function? Who owns the physical infrastructure then?
The public (ie, local or state government). Like the roads. Like the sewers. Like (some) power lines. Like the phone and coax lines (depending on time period, they have passed between private and public owners, but were always state subsidized in their deployment).
Not a government ISP, you can have private routing centers. Just public wire in the dirt, so that one company can't own the only access to ones home and make it impossible to compete.
While that might have been true of the past, we do have countries like Sweden, where the state is currently rolling out 1Gb/s connections. Even the country side is having fiber rolled out.
Depends on where and who you ask. There are definitely people who will take your body parts in sale. (Think iPhone craze + China and remember back to people selling kidneys.)
Thanks, but no thanks. Have you seen the roads around here? They've been repaving / widening / narrowing / re-routing the main drag near my apartment for something like a year now and it still isn't done, and the design makes traffic far worse than it was before. No way do I want the same people who run the local highway department having anything (more than already) to do with my broadband access.
It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".
Considering the state of the infrastructure in the US I think the last people I would trust with this is the government. I can see a model similar to how natural gas and even electricity is using in some states, where their is one carrier responsible for the pipes/lines and everyone and their brother selling service over it.
The government got involved with a lot of those examples because private firms at the time (allegedly) couldn't have gotten it done (too expensive, required easement rights on properties, etc).
The internet already exists. All of today's problems are minor in scope to the original problems of connecting the nation together. Why turn it over the government now?
We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits.
Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being toll-roads, especially when the traffic flow can radically change overnight. Who knows where the next youtube will be, or if google will move the servers suddenly after a SOPA directive is voted in.
Lastly, government could loosen their total control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doing so would enabled a true global mesh network to be built, giving anyone with a receiver/transmitter the ability to participated. So long government claims to own the communication layer in the air, I will hold them responsible for the current communication issues in the cables.
The FCC now dictates that all are ISPs must include a statement on their public websites detailing what types of filtering, rate-limiting, traffic shaping, etc., that they do (e.g. if they prioritize their own VoIP customers over Netflix or something), but I'm not sure that many providers do. Even most of the ones that do probably intentionally try to make it hard to find.
In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost.
Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead.
I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.
Your ISP wanting money to install caching servers for Netflix and YouTube is not something which has been covered ny net neutrality in the past. It would be great if there was a fixed colo fee for caching servers.
That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.
I can't believe ISPs would fight free caching servers. I was happy when I saw traffic coming from somehost.myisp.net while loading content from YouTube.
If an ISP thinks the bandwidth savings of caching servers don't outweigh the space and power that they consume, there's always peering. It sounds like major broadband ISPs are doing neither.
FWIW, if Netflix agrees to install one of their appliances in your network, they do it completely free of charge.
If you don't meet their requirements (which are based upon average aggregate traffic levels), you can't even pay them to get one.
If your ISP meets the requirements and is refusing, well, it's their own damn fault -- they're simply wasting money.
Personally, I am happy to peer with anyone with whom I share a presence, even if they're an "eyeball network" like me and we'd only be passing a few megabits of traffic.
Because given that practice continues, and is accepted, we could find ourselves in a position where making a website now requires a regional fee to the ISP guild.
I don't? I honestly don't know that. If my hosting company does, I'm sure they would pass that additional cost directly to me. I don't see a problem here.
You don't pay it directly. But you are paying your hosting company who is several steps down the line paying a backbone provider to tie their network to the rest of the world's networks. So, yes, you really are paying to have other users be able to connect to your site.
I don't see that net neutrality has much to do with it. I think that your other reason: monopolies: is the sole reason for these problems.
I have never had any of the problems described in the article. I live in the UK, and use a small ISP that prides itself on giving me a high quality service. And I get it.
Edit: downvoting? Really? If you disagree, then why not provide an actual explanation of why fixing the monopolies won't fix this problem on its own in a reply?
From the article:
"Instead, network operators can degrade traffic by failing to upgrade connections without severing them entirely. The public won't realize that's what's going on unless negotiations become so contentious that one party makes them public—or a government decides to investigate."
I don't think the US government (or those of its several states) is competent enough to regulate the complex interconnections between networks. I predict that the major ISPs will be able to find new tools to degrade network conditions faster than regulators will be able to sanction them for it, should the government choose to go after this fight at all: the essential abandonment of the wholesale provisions of the Telecommunication Act of 1996 ended the possibility of reasonable widespread competition for broadband: lack of choices is why this is a problem in the first place.
So, the problem is that bandwidth is limited. There isn't infinite bandwidth available. You're dissatisfied with the way a monopolizing ISP is choosing to ration bandwidth.
Your solution is to have the government, through legislation, control how bandwidth is rationed? Yes, by all means, instead of degraded YouTube performance, let's just cut everyone's bandwidth across the board to some idiotic bandwidth guarantee. As if the government would somehow magically be able to better ration bandwidth than the companies that, you know, actually provide it.
A better solution might be to get rid of regulations and try to lower the barriers to entry, so that it's easier for smaller startups to get into the same space as the ISP's. "But limited infrastructure, blah blah, whaa whaa." Shut it.
Google shouldn't be the only company with the ability to create new infrastructure (like inflatables). But since regulation around internet infrastructure has to be micro-managed by so many levels of government, it only makes things harder for the non-Googles.
> We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation
I walked away from the article much more skeptical of the value of net neutrality rules.
Are you going to have a law that requires someone maintain all their equipment? How will you know what's "maintained enough?" What about the companies that didn't deploy as much capacity as service providers wanted? How will you eliminate the appearance of favoritism in regulators enforcing something so vague?
That said, I'm all for breaking up monopolies and punishing collusion though, that seems like an easier fix, something we have more experience enforcing.
Step one here is transparency. Before we impose new mechanisms by legislating, we should allow detailed study of the ones that are in place. To do that we may need legislation that states simply: All such peering agreements, including all of the technical and financial terms, shall be filed as public documents with the FCC at least 7 days prior to taking effect.
This accomplishes two things: It allows third-party analysis, and it provides early warning of change to affected parties.
If you have a Mac, try a free program called YouView. Google YouView Mac. It gives you YouTube experience, but uses the MP4 files YouTube hosts for the mobile platforms. I never have a problem with YouView. Some times it's slow, but at least you can download the entire movie before watching. Also, it uses a lot less resources, 5-10% CPU vs 30%+ if played via browser. This means better battery life.
I think something like that must exist for windows and Linux, but I could not find anything free.
You should try to stream live content from twitch.tv. Pretty much everyone complains about how bad their service is, and twitch has been very clear that they're doing everything they can but that it mostly comes down to these deals with the big Internet infrastructure guys.
Here I was cursing my ISP for ridiculous connection but I should have been cursing them for entirely different reasons! What is the use of taking costly high speed plans when the sites that require high speed (youtube, other video streaming) are still going to be slow?
The internet used to be ran by engineers. Now it's ran by suits ...
The former does what needs to be done, and all pitch in to move traffic. Suits on the other hand only see $$$.
As for the suits: either your are overselling your bandwidth and you don't have enough money to make the necessary changes REGARDLESS of where the traffic is going/coming from. Or your just being greedy !
To fight this, I think it's best to get review ISP by their real speed. Then getting this information out to the public. So people can select the best ISP, and natural selection of the fittest(fairest ISP) will occur.
Not sure if that last part will work. I can definitely see Comcast allowing speed test to work to it's fullest and then buffering youtube and other sites where performance matters.
What stops speed tests being done that use real sites for their tests?
I could envision using a random YouTube/Netflix/Hulu video for a test to be done across several providers at the same time. Add some legal torrent and FTP servers as you're at it.
That way you get results that can be compared directly. For end user results, you really don't need to be that thorough when comparing results (after all, if you're doing at different times on different you are already adding unhandled variables) you just use any random video from one of those providers.
I thought this idea was actually quite good, although sometimes the buffering issue is there.
About 50% of videos I've watched, I've tuned of within 1 minute because it wasn't what I expected. The old system would have buffered about 10 minutes worth by then. The new system only buffers about 15 seconds. This is a huge bandwidth saving when you think of it on a mass scale.
Youtube has a very poor connection around my area in Canada. Video connections are unreliable, unexpectedly dropping or just being slow. Slower than the Kbps of the video I'm trying to watch.
For youtube's client side player this is completely intolerable. Which is why you don't depend on youtube's clientside player for anything. Use SMplayers downloader, or youtube-dl, or videodownloadhelper. These make use of more dependable protocols for downloading the video, and they will download 100% of the video.
You can buffer several videos up and watch effectively.
My user experience is so much better than what people experience through official channels. How can that be? I hacked my user experience together with bits of string and duct tape. Why should my experience be so miserable on official channels when so many manhours have supposedly went into making that experience the best?
Should you really be losing out to bits of string and duct tape?
What the ISP's are doing to youtube isn't fair, but the ISP's are clearly not the only ones at fault.
What area? What ISP? Let's start naming and shaming.. ;)
I had a pathetic experience with an ISP "reselling" Bell's DSL service. The ISP's name is Distributel. YouTube would not, at "peak times" (6pm - 9pm on weekdays, most times on weekends), work at 1080. The download speed forced you to wait for the entire clip to pre-buffer before it would be possible to play it.
What was frustrating was that opening an SSH proxy to a US server (hosted at Linode) and going through that proxy would allow you to watch 1080 clips with plenty of pre-buffering headroom. I tried to explain this to tech support (with bandwidth measurements, etc) to no avail.
I finally switched over to TekSavvy who have always had their shit down. They truly rock (the tech support is amazing).
Shaw. lower mainland. Also I can't get out of using shaw, Telus isn't competing with them, and there are no other lines into our complex. I am stuck with them, I have no choice. I want to leave.
I wish I had TekSavvy. I really do. Next time I move I'm checking which telecoms I have access to. If it's only shaw or telus, I'm demanding discounts.
I remember the glory days when YouTube would buffer the whole video from where you started, at a very uniform speed. If you wanted to jump to somewhere in the video and it was buffered, there was no rebuffering.
ISP's or not, it is infuriating for me as a user to see a website get significantly worse as it gets bigger and bigger.
Youtube was almost unwatchable on my 50/30 FiOS till I did this http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi.... This completely transformed my youtube experience to one that's fine compared to waiting 10 minutes for a 1 minute 240p video to buffer enough I could watch it all the way through.
Now the only problems I have are with the semi-broken new player, fast forwards and rewinds are often broken, full screen doesn't always full screen etc.
As a temporary workaround I access YouTube over an IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric. Since I set it up almost two years ago I have had no issues with YouTube. The only downside has been the IRS's quarterly tax site which seems to be misconfigured for IPv6 access but works if r over IPv4 (/etc/hosts FTW).
Interesting, thanks for the idea. I've just finished setting up an IPv6tunnel w/ sixxs.net, so I'll have to see if IPv6 connectivity provides a better YouTube experience on my network.
YouTube usually works quite well on my network (TimeWarner Cable in SE Wisconsin, US), but occasionally I'll be completely unable to receive HD streams of certain content, so I have to select 480/320p to buffer the video at all.
Just the other day I had a non-technical friend ask me if upgrading his 50Mb connection to 75 as suggested by Verizon would get rid of his YouTube buffering problems.
I wonder how prevalent and successful such fraudulent upselling is?
The reality is that major ISPs like Verizon and Comcast want Netflix to DIE because it is a major competitor of theirs. How many people have cut their cable TV service because Netflix is "good enough?"
So Verizon and Comcast can compete with Netflix, or they can attempt to cut off their knees.
"Nice streaming service you got there. Be a shame if it was so slow your users got frustrated and cancelled their service."
This is why Verizon and Comcast don't take Netflix up on their offer to provide caching servers, create peering agreements and take other actions that actually decrease the ISP's cost. Because Verizon and Comcast want Netflix DEAD.
Given this discussion, what's the best resource for choosing a new ISP? I'm moving to SF in a week and I want to get a really nice connection for my apartment?
This peering issue has affected me a lot. I watch a lot of gaming streams online and during peek hours Twitch.tv has becomes unusable. During a major tournament this is very unfortunate. Another example of this peering dispute affecting me is with the game League of Legends.
Almost everyone who is on Comcast (myself included) during peek times experiences lag that makes the game unplayable. Your character "skates" along the map and usually when it buffers and catches up to you you'll find yourself dead. My friends and I got together to play over the weekend and ended up having to stop due to the lag.
Heres a thread where the guys at Riot are trying to identify the issue. It wasn't until 7/22 that they identified the problem everyone has been having was due to a peering dispute between Verizon and other vendors. To fix the problem they are having to make changes with their provider to route traffic to bypass problematic junctions.
Its been very eye opening to me. I have a 50mb connection and I always thought that as long as I had a faster connection I wouldn't have lag issues. It was disappointing to learn that regardless of your connection you can still be throttled by ISPs and their vendors.
Can you not change to a better ISP? It's ridiculous to be paying good money for high speed internet if your ISP can't handle the load. I've been using shaw.ca for years with zero problems since they upgraded their network to fibre, and we have two other pretty decent providers to choose from as well.
I'm sure you must have a decent ISP somewhere down in the states. If not, perhaps you just need to wait for google to do it.
The way I understand it is that my internet traffic is like a little dog that wants to get from my yard to Netflix's yard to play. To do that, the poor pup has to cross 6 other yards to get there. Some of the yards are nice and friendly with pretty flowers to sniff along the way.
Other yards are owned by mean people that don't want to let the dog through unless it's owner (your ISP) pays them more money. If the owner doesn't pay more money, the mean yard owners will make the pup sit there and wait for a long time until they say it's okay to go (LAG).
And sometimes, the mean owner have so many dogs waiting in his yard, he decides to throw them into the street, where they are never seen nor heard from again (packet loss).
Most people could definitely change ISPs and avoid the troublesome vendors their ISP is currently peered with but I live in a town (low population) and unfortunately Comcast is about as good as it gets.
One way to get around it is to route my traffic through a proxy to bypass the troublesome vendors but that would degrade my bitrate which is frustrating since what I really want is to just get what I am paying for 50/mb and wish the internet providers would just work it out.
No, that's not (always) true. My ISP's traffic goes directly from their network to Google.
According to the article Comcast are trying to charge Google for letting Comcast's customers watch youtube, which is a weird and evil way to do business. I think it basically boils down to Comcast being a really shitty ISP and you (unfortunately) not having much choice.
The irony here is that Comcast is a 10x larger company than Shaw, so perhaps it's just a case of Comcast throwing their weight around and basically resorting to extortion.
Sounds like mirroring and ftp servers (or even bittorrent) would work just fine for distributing copyright-cleared video. Indeed that's how I remember it being done before YouTube and Netflix existed.
Today, with the explosion of online video, the copyright-clearance step could be administered by companies (as it already is, e.g., YouTube), but the servers providing distribution to the users at the network edge do not have to be run by companies.
1. Recall that storage is quite inexpensive and users are today quite capable of providing their own at home or on-the-go storage for terabytes or gigabytes of video.
2. Recall the "content-centric" networking idea Van Jacobsen has presented to Googlers. Does it really matter where the user gets the content? No. What is important is that it is authentic (and copyright-cleared).
This article just brought a whole new meaning to Google Fibre. I think Google is seriously considering becoming an ISP which would make a lot of sense seeing as how they make up 25% of North America's traffic already[1].
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread[1] - Apparently they added this quite recently http://www.ghacks.net/2013/04/06/youtube-introduces-ultra-lo...
You know you have fucked up player when congestion control http requests spam more than video stream itself.
It makes no logical sense for the player to reload something that was already loaded since that would handily double their traffic (if only in this situation).
Which makes me think they don't actually buffer anymore. The bar just shows a standard, imaginary amount of buffering by default and nobody really cares.
It makes me very uncomfortable how "true" that feels.
Making a general video host is so expensive and complicated that we may have to just resign to use YouTube for at least some more years... but it's easily one of the worst user experiences regarding online videos.
Netflix does this too and it drives me nuts, especially when I'm watching something in HD because it automatically switches to low definition for a few seconds until the high definition version is loaded.
But the ISP makes a gigantic difference. I have the benefit of a great ISP (smallish in size, no surprise) and seeing all the youtube jokes about ads always working but not the videos themselves made me somewhat puzzled, as the very few times a video doesn't stream it's just as likely to be the ad that pauses as the main video, and that's super annoying because you can't skip ahead in an ad like you can the main video. I figured that other ISPs were worse, but there must be some exaggeration going on for comedic effect.
Then recently I was at my parent's house for a while, where they are on Time Warner. I really had no idea how unusable it could be. Constant pausing of video for loading every 20 seconds or so, waiting at the very beginning of almost every video, not knowing if a video was loading or there was some kind of error and the page needed to be refreshed.
I'm really used to checking youtube for how to do basic household tasks. Often you'll have to go through two or three to find a good video on a subject. You can't do that at all in that environment, as the waiting is just too much. I'd switch to 240p just to get the gist of a video to make sure I wanted to watch it, so definitely forget any movies you want to see with good quality video. I would queue up videos so at least something was buffered, which meant you have to plan ahead on what you want to watch, totally changing how you use the site.
It's really like a totally different product. I think of youtube as the wikipedia of home repair and cooking (or maybe more ehow or whatever, but the point is that it has an expert video for everything) and I also use it for constant mindless browsing and watching interesting talk after interesting talk, quickly deciding if something is worth watching within 30 seconds by scrubbing around in the video a few times. You can't use it for either of those things, and the desire to pull out your hair while waiting for anything else taints any other use, too.
If I was on that Time Warner connection, I wouldn't be making jokes about how ads always seem to buffer just fine, I would be completely puzzled how other people would think that Youtube was in any way worth using. It really felt like stepping back to dialup.
My connection isn't especially fast, but maybe my ISP does the local CDN thing. People should try it out, because I suspect the transition the other way would be closer to a religious experience, or like stepping out of a time machine. Meanwhile Googlers working on the youtube player might want to all get a Time Warner connection, as maybe designing for that (as opposed to more specific bandwidth or latency limitations) might make for a better player for the many suffering people out there.
I have their second-highest tier, 30Mbps down / 5Mbps up. The speeds I receive are pretty consistent, even during peak hours, according to speed tests.
I often find that YouTube will either work splendidly on my TWC connection, or it simply won't work at all. In other words: perhaps 80-90% of videos I can seek to a new spot in a 1080p video w/o any perceptible buffering... the other 10% of the time the video just refuses to load, or seeking is horribly broken, or it cuts off before the video is finished.
I guess I would agree that, for the videos that fail, YouTube _does feel_ like a different product.
(I should also add that, in my case, advertisements usually work even when the video fails to load.)
It replaces the YouTube player with the standard html5 video player. This alone made my experience on YouTube way better. My connection is slow, so many times I'll just open a YouTube video in a background tab, and leave it loading for a while. With this, I can just preload the whole video. And seeking doesn't make the video reload.
A side bonus, also, is that every video will use the html5 player, so making flash useless on YouTube (one of the few sites that make me keep flash installed). It will also remove the ads, so it might not be your thing for moral/ethical reasons.
My slow 1.5mbps Internet has had awful youtube experience since the player change. I have been downloading most of the videos directly to avoid using it.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/video-downloadhe...
I've only used it a few times but it seems to work well. You can choose which video (resolution/quality) to download and then I usually watch 'em later using VLC.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1-click-youtu...
I noticed that they introduced this feature around the same time they removed the right-click option to stop downloading the video.
Moreover, the little that is prebuffered seems to behave oddly, you skip forward well within the indicated area that have been buffered, yet the player seems to reset and start re-downloading that part -> unueably slow.
It helped a lot, especially when YT was slow as hell on Free in France.
We desperately need to break up ISP monopolies and enact strict net neutrality regulation and bandwidth (even latency/routing) guarantees. The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre. By any basic reasoning, an ISP that doesn't enable access to YouTube should be out of customers within a few months. That this doesn't happen is testament to the broken market surrounding internet access, and a bad sign for the fights that await us.
(Google needs to start naming and shaming the ISPs that do not want to peer with them on reasonable conditions or with sufficient capacity when they detect bad performance on YouTube. They have been doing this locally, e.g. they delisted french news sites from Google News when these lobbied for protectionist laws, and they have been stating the parties that forbid them from showing copyrighted content, e.g. the GEMA in Germany.)
What's your stance ? That's a very valid question regarding relationships between individuals, with the law and authorities in one group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_trade#Current_Restriction...
It's not a perfect analogy, but as the old saying goes... "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand".
The internet already exists. All of today's problems are minor in scope to the original problems of connecting the nation together. Why turn it over the government now?
We could have a FRAND like situation, where backbone network entities has to sign a Reasonable and non-discriminatory agreement regarding traffic flows. FRAND like systems has it own set of issues, but it has also clear benefits.
Government is the second obvious one. As with roads, government benefit greatly from improved infrastructure. All roads do not benefit from being toll-roads, especially when the traffic flow can radically change overnight. Who knows where the next youtube will be, or if google will move the servers suddenly after a SOPA directive is voted in.
Lastly, government could loosen their total control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Doing so would enabled a true global mesh network to be built, giving anyone with a receiver/transmitter the ability to participated. So long government claims to own the communication layer in the air, I will hold them responsible for the current communication issues in the cables.
Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead.
I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was...
That said, I pay my ISP for bandwidth and service. It's bullshit if they refuse free installation of caching servers which improves my service and frees up upstream bandwidth for others.
Great for whom? Legally mandated fixed fee services are generally not the highest in customer satisfaction.
If you don't meet their requirements (which are based upon average aggregate traffic levels), you can't even pay them to get one.
If your ISP meets the requirements and is refusing, well, it's their own damn fault -- they're simply wasting money.
Personally, I am happy to peer with anyone with whom I share a presence, even if they're an "eyeball network" like me and we'd only be passing a few megabits of traffic.
why is this bizarre?
you pay for hosting, yes, of course. You don't additionally pay individual ISPs to guarantee it's users access to your sites.
Besides, one nitpick: the Google News story was in Belgium, not in France.
Belgium http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-news...
France http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168
I have never had any of the problems described in the article. I live in the UK, and use a small ISP that prides itself on giving me a high quality service. And I get it.
Edit: downvoting? Really? If you disagree, then why not provide an actual explanation of why fixing the monopolies won't fix this problem on its own in a reply?
I don't think the US government (or those of its several states) is competent enough to regulate the complex interconnections between networks. I predict that the major ISPs will be able to find new tools to degrade network conditions faster than regulators will be able to sanction them for it, should the government choose to go after this fight at all: the essential abandonment of the wholesale provisions of the Telecommunication Act of 1996 ended the possibility of reasonable widespread competition for broadband: lack of choices is why this is a problem in the first place.
Some even go a step further, inspecting unencrypted HTTP traffic and replacing referrer IDs and such on advertisement links (e.g. links to Amazon).
Your solution is to have the government, through legislation, control how bandwidth is rationed? Yes, by all means, instead of degraded YouTube performance, let's just cut everyone's bandwidth across the board to some idiotic bandwidth guarantee. As if the government would somehow magically be able to better ration bandwidth than the companies that, you know, actually provide it.
A better solution might be to get rid of regulations and try to lower the barriers to entry, so that it's easier for smaller startups to get into the same space as the ISP's. "But limited infrastructure, blah blah, whaa whaa." Shut it.
Google shouldn't be the only company with the ability to create new infrastructure (like inflatables). But since regulation around internet infrastructure has to be micro-managed by so many levels of government, it only makes things harder for the non-Googles.
I walked away from the article much more skeptical of the value of net neutrality rules.
Are you going to have a law that requires someone maintain all their equipment? How will you know what's "maintained enough?" What about the companies that didn't deploy as much capacity as service providers wanted? How will you eliminate the appearance of favoritism in regulators enforcing something so vague?
That said, I'm all for breaking up monopolies and punishing collusion though, that seems like an easier fix, something we have more experience enforcing.
This accomplishes two things: It allows third-party analysis, and it provides early warning of change to affected parties.
Does this mean no one will every be a true competitor to Youtube or match its performance unless they pay all the local ISPs?
Once net neutrality is broken, the market is also broken.
I think something like that must exist for windows and Linux, but I could not find anything free.
The former does what needs to be done, and all pitch in to move traffic. Suits on the other hand only see $$$.
As for the suits: either your are overselling your bandwidth and you don't have enough money to make the necessary changes REGARDLESS of where the traffic is going/coming from. Or your just being greedy !
To fight this, I think it's best to get review ISP by their real speed. Then getting this information out to the public. So people can select the best ISP, and natural selection of the fittest(fairest ISP) will occur.
I could envision using a random YouTube/Netflix/Hulu video for a test to be done across several providers at the same time. Add some legal torrent and FTP servers as you're at it.
That way you get results that can be compared directly. For end user results, you really don't need to be that thorough when comparing results (after all, if you're doing at different times on different you are already adding unhandled variables) you just use any random video from one of those providers.
Unfortunately it doesn't measure real content providers so it may not detect peering problems.
For youtube's client side player this is completely intolerable. Which is why you don't depend on youtube's clientside player for anything. Use SMplayers downloader, or youtube-dl, or videodownloadhelper. These make use of more dependable protocols for downloading the video, and they will download 100% of the video.
You can buffer several videos up and watch effectively.
My user experience is so much better than what people experience through official channels. How can that be? I hacked my user experience together with bits of string and duct tape. Why should my experience be so miserable on official channels when so many manhours have supposedly went into making that experience the best?
Should you really be losing out to bits of string and duct tape?
What the ISP's are doing to youtube isn't fair, but the ISP's are clearly not the only ones at fault.
I had a pathetic experience with an ISP "reselling" Bell's DSL service. The ISP's name is Distributel. YouTube would not, at "peak times" (6pm - 9pm on weekdays, most times on weekends), work at 1080. The download speed forced you to wait for the entire clip to pre-buffer before it would be possible to play it.
What was frustrating was that opening an SSH proxy to a US server (hosted at Linode) and going through that proxy would allow you to watch 1080 clips with plenty of pre-buffering headroom. I tried to explain this to tech support (with bandwidth measurements, etc) to no avail.
I finally switched over to TekSavvy who have always had their shit down. They truly rock (the tech support is amazing).
I wish I had TekSavvy. I really do. Next time I move I'm checking which telecoms I have access to. If it's only shaw or telus, I'm demanding discounts.
ISP's or not, it is infuriating for me as a user to see a website get significantly worse as it gets bigger and bigger.
Now the only problems I have are with the semi-broken new player, fast forwards and rewinds are often broken, full screen doesn't always full screen etc.
YouTube usually works quite well on my network (TimeWarner Cable in SE Wisconsin, US), but occasionally I'll be completely unable to receive HD streams of certain content, so I have to select 480/320p to buffer the video at all.
I wonder how prevalent and successful such fraudulent upselling is?
I dug up a link that I saved:
http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-yo...
Here is the fix:
So Verizon and Comcast can compete with Netflix, or they can attempt to cut off their knees.
"Nice streaming service you got there. Be a shame if it was so slow your users got frustrated and cancelled their service."
This is why Verizon and Comcast don't take Netflix up on their offer to provide caching servers, create peering agreements and take other actions that actually decrease the ISP's cost. Because Verizon and Comcast want Netflix DEAD.
Almost everyone who is on Comcast (myself included) during peek times experiences lag that makes the game unplayable. Your character "skates" along the map and usually when it buffers and catches up to you you'll find yourself dead. My friends and I got together to play over the weekend and ended up having to stop due to the lag.
Heres a thread where the guys at Riot are trying to identify the issue. It wasn't until 7/22 that they identified the problem everyone has been having was due to a peering dispute between Verizon and other vendors. To fix the problem they are having to make changes with their provider to route traffic to bypass problematic junctions.
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=3521364
Its been very eye opening to me. I have a 50mb connection and I always thought that as long as I had a faster connection I wouldn't have lag issues. It was disappointing to learn that regardless of your connection you can still be throttled by ISPs and their vendors.
I'm sure you must have a decent ISP somewhere down in the states. If not, perhaps you just need to wait for google to do it.
Other yards are owned by mean people that don't want to let the dog through unless it's owner (your ISP) pays them more money. If the owner doesn't pay more money, the mean yard owners will make the pup sit there and wait for a long time until they say it's okay to go (LAG).
And sometimes, the mean owner have so many dogs waiting in his yard, he decides to throw them into the street, where they are never seen nor heard from again (packet loss).
Most people could definitely change ISPs and avoid the troublesome vendors their ISP is currently peered with but I live in a town (low population) and unfortunately Comcast is about as good as it gets.
One way to get around it is to route my traffic through a proxy to bypass the troublesome vendors but that would degrade my bitrate which is frustrating since what I really want is to just get what I am paying for 50/mb and wish the internet providers would just work it out.
According to the article Comcast are trying to charge Google for letting Comcast's customers watch youtube, which is a weird and evil way to do business. I think it basically boils down to Comcast being a really shitty ISP and you (unfortunately) not having much choice.
The irony here is that Comcast is a 10x larger company than Shaw, so perhaps it's just a case of Comcast throwing their weight around and basically resorting to extortion.
Today, with the explosion of online video, the copyright-clearance step could be administered by companies (as it already is, e.g., YouTube), but the servers providing distribution to the users at the network edge do not have to be run by companies.
1. Recall that storage is quite inexpensive and users are today quite capable of providing their own at home or on-the-go storage for terabytes or gigabytes of video.
2. Recall the "content-centric" networking idea Van Jacobsen has presented to Googlers. Does it really matter where the user gets the content? No. What is important is that it is authentic (and copyright-cleared).
1 - http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/google-internet...