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I've always wondered why the need for ABR... Article mentions droppping from 1080p to 360p like it's a feature, but I would say its horrible to do that... If

I've always wondered why the need for ABR... Article mentions droppping from 1080p to 360p like it's a feature, but I would say its horrible to do that... If I'm watching a movie or listening to music I don't want random switches to poor quality or lower resolution and associated glitches. I'd much rather see the spinning wheel and complain to my provider that I'm not getting what I paid for or check what's going wrong. I can understand various resolutions and codecs based on user preferences and devices but that's a fixed choice. Am I in the minority here?

izacus 3y ago
Yes, absolutely. Vastly. Hugely. As someone who's worked in video delivery, I can't overstate how much the majority prefers not to have stutters in their video while sitting on a subway/bus/train/massive SUV.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Exactly. I'd much rather wait a minute and buffer more video at reasonable resolution and bitrate, rather than switching to something unwatchable.
  - stilldavid 3y ago
    I believe this post covers the most common use case of Twitch, which is live streaming. You don't want to be a minute behind the video when chat is live.
    - eska 3y ago
      I’m not sure, since most people don’t interact with chat. Personally I use yt-dlp with mpv and have the buffer set very large. This allows me to pause the stream when I take a toilet break or similar. When I come back I can also skip ahead through ads or idle times on the stream, or watch at increased speed to catch up if needed.
  - remram 3y ago
    You're saying "exactly' but then state the opposite...
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      Clearly I misinterpreted what the post I was replying to meant by "stutters". More importantly, I misread that post's "Yes, absolutely. Vastly. Hugely." as a response to the rest of the post before that, rather than a response to the question at the end of "Am I in the minority here?". I was thinking of experiences on YouTube where it refuses to buffer enough to allow playing the whole video, leading to inevitable stutters.
  - Aurornis 3y ago
    > I'd much rather wait a minute and buffer more video at reasonable resolution and bitrate, rather than switching to something unwatchable. A full minute of buffering would only give about 5% more bandwidth for a typical 22 minute TV show. That’s not going to transform it from “something unwatchable” to the higher bitrate video you want. It will, however, cause a large majority of people to give up on the stream. The number of people who would actually prefer 1 minute of buffering for negligibly higher quality is almost nonexistent. This is why buffering is futile: Once a stream gets to the point of stopping to buffer, the mismatch between available bandwidth and the encoded bitrate is just too great to reasonably overcome.
    - adriancr 3y ago
      I think you're talking about a different use case then OP. For your point, an example is viewing 1080p on 64kbit/s is unreasonable and nothing will fix it. For OP's point, I can imagine viewing 1080p (10Mbit/s) on a 1Gbit/s connection means a little buffer will solve the need for ABR as random packet loss or minor drops can be recovered with retries seamlessly as opposed to dropping quality to ABR. So buffering is futile only when bandwidth is not sufficient, and even there its questionable, perhaps user might just want to download and view after that's complete rather then have poor quality.
      - IanCal 3y ago
        You still have buffering with abr.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      This might be true on a wired link, but on wifi, it's not unusual to see bandwidth drop well below the mean throughput for 10s of seconds. One minute of buffering is enough to hide those issues. In many cases the quality drops during those times and then never goes back up again, so I'm stuck looking at giant macroblock artifacts for the rest of the movie (unless I hit stop and start playing it over again).
      - kiwijamo 3y ago
- pricechild 3y ago
  This reminds me of Google search rankings historically(?) favouring sites which loaded quicker. Stories at the time (5-10+ years ago?) reported this to be evident at surprisingly small limits - people not waiting less than a second. I'm not surprised it's a similar tale with video delivery. In my experience, what frustrated me most was predictable stalls every 10s or so. I don't see that much any more.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Yep, I believe loading times over 300ms or so already caused a drop of visitors? Funny how react developers completely forgot about that :D
wpm 3y ago
In Halo Master Chief Collection, viewing any of the video terminals that are scattered throughout the game world would boot you out of the game over to some stupid app you had to download. When I first came across this I was already mad, but the kicker was that the app would stream the video, these gorgeous, meticulously crafted and headline featured videos, over HLS and the first few dozen seconds of video were always blocky, blurry messes because my internet at the time was rather slow. No option to download all of the videos ahead of time. No option to force video quality to some higher resolution. Just a big blurry mess. So, I skipped that entire feature of the game and figured I'd have to watch them on YouTube later, where I could force it into 1080p and let it buffer a bit. More annoying even now are the constant "Hey moron, is your video stuttering? Try lowering the quality!" 4head tapping messages I see on Twitch or YouTube when their CDN is taking a shit. I pay good money for 1G/1G symmetric, my PC is 6 feet from my wireless AP. If you can't feed me 6Mbps of live stream at me without stuttering I don't think it's a me problem. If MoQ means an end to or improvement that terrible ABR experience, it can't come quic enough.
- QuercusMax 3y ago
  Watching anything on Paramount+ gives me 30 seconds of incredibly awful blocky graphics, then it finally gives me full-resolution high quality. Usually it's just the Paramount+ ads that are this awful, but I really wish there was a way to say "spend 20s buffering so I can watch the whole thing in HQ".
Uehreka 3y ago
I think it’s fine as long as the user can opt-out and have the opt-out stick[0]. My problem with YouTube is that I can’t tell them “when I’m not on a metered connection, blast my face with as many pixels, frames and bits of color as possible” and actually have that happen. [0] I say opt-out not opt-in because the audience for ABR is people who wouldn’t know where to find an opt-in button or wouldn’t know that it exists.
- kroltan 3y ago
  The "Enhancer for YouTube" browser extension has a setting to force assign the resolution to whatever you choose. I was having issues that even if my player indicated it was playing 1440p, it clearly was at most 640p or something like that, complete potatovision. Re-clicking the 1440p option would fix it, and this extension basically does that for you. Good luck on mobile, though lol
KaiserPro 3y ago
> Am I in the minority here? Probably. I used to work in broadcast, so I have been conditioned to seek out the highest quality video I can find. So like you, I will accept buffering for higher quality playback. However I still see people who force 4:3 into 16:9 because it fills the screen, and people who still have motion smoothing on their TV so everything looks like 60fps until the stream breaks. however on mobile, and I just want to see the shitty politician say the shitty thing. I think most people want decent audio with mostly moving pictures. Most people can't see HD at TV distances anyway, so I suspect so long as it sounds good, most people don't notice too much.
- andersa 3y ago
  TV without motion smoothing is absurdly terrible. Might as well watch the movie in Google Slides. Once they get with the times and record the movies in 120 fps, we can get rid of it.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    24 fps panning shots give me headaches. A small amount of smoothing is essential.
    - andersa 3y ago
      Yes, this is the exact issue. My eyes can't even interpret this as motion sometimes, so it just looks like a juddering mess and I can't really see anything.
  - jonathanlydall 3y ago
    I think it’s very subjective as I personally find injected frames makes things look “odd”. It’s also worth mentioning that Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit was shot at double FPS (48 if I recall correctly), and was regarded by many as looking “off”. Based on the fact Hollywood has not made any high FPS movies since, it seems that it was generally regarded as a failed experiment.
    - 3y ago
andersa 3y ago
It depends. If I'm watching a movie, I obviously want the highest quality, and it really annoys me when the app doesn't have a feature to force the quality. Great, that means the movie is canceled and I'll have to try again at some arbitrary later time, because I'm not going to watch it as a blocky mess just because their servers are having a moment. If I'm watching a live stream, I'll take whatever quality currently works. Waiting to buffer it would mean I'm behind everyone else...
jeppesen-io 3y ago
> Am I in the minority here? Yes, and it's not even close. Metrics are clear - stutter/loading will cause many more people to close the window vs lower quality. > I can understand various resolutions and codecs based on user preferences and devices but that's a fixed choice. What are the odds that many of those users who set a preference and forget about it, now are wondering why youtube etc. never works at their coffee shop or when in the back yard where the WiFi is weak? The majority of video on the internet is viewed from wireless networks which always have a chance to vary in quality
anotherhue 3y ago
I'd much rather the audio keep streaming while the video does its thing.
CYR1X 3y ago
The masses aren't great at distinguishing between 1080p and 720p, or 720p and 360p. They don't even know what video codecs are. So no they aren't really going to complain if their 1080p video downs to 360p for 2 seconds.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Aurornis 3y ago
> I'd much rather see the spinning wheel and complain to my provider that I'm not getting what I paid for or check what's going wrong. You are deeply in the minority. People hate buffering because it’s rarely a 1-time event. Once a video starts buffering, it’s usually a sign that something is wrong and it’s not going to continue happening. People have internalized this and will give up quickly once buffering happens. You’re also assuming that the issue would be with your internet provider and that complaining to them will resolve it. Neither of those assumptions are true most of the time. While there are cases of degraded internet downlink performance, the more common failure modes involve people’s WiFi. Borderline connection quality can turn into interruptions when their nearby neighbor starts a download on the same WiFi channel, or if someone in the same house starts using the WiFi at the same time.
boneitis 3y ago
(This is all to say that I 100% feel the same way.) I like getting feedback. I don't like when platforms try to smooth out the rough edges invisibly... they often end up in me experiencing breaking problems without my realizing I am experiencing breaking problems. It extends so much farther than having the choice to force a video feed resolution. I don't like when voice and video channels "seamlessly" pitchshift and speed-up/slow-down (at least, without indication). I already find it unacceptable how aggressively most platforms like to compress sound in their audio codecs, presumably in the name of saving bandwidth. Slack application going 1000% out of their way to never let you know that it has a connection drop, so you never know if it re-established comms when you know your net dropped out for a moment, or if you need to hard refresh with Ctrl+R, because you heard the Slack notification on the phone right next to you, but you can't tell whether the desktop app has received the latest messages (often, it hasn't). In all seriousness, I would love something where my computer lcd subtly shades red or blue along the edges of the display depending on when I'm getting network jitter/latency and when it's catching up, and things like that. How cool would that be?
HumblyTossed 3y ago
> Am I in the minority here? Yes, actually.

izacus 3y ago

Yes, absolutely. Vastly. Hugely. As someone who's worked in video delivery, I can't overstate how much the majority prefers not to have stutters in their video while sitting on a subway/bus/train/massive SUV.

JoshTriplett 3y ago
Exactly. I'd much rather wait a minute and buffer more video at reasonable resolution and bitrate, rather than switching to something unwatchable.
- stilldavid 3y ago
  I believe this post covers the most common use case of Twitch, which is live streaming. You don't want to be a minute behind the video when chat is live.
  - eska 3y ago
    I’m not sure, since most people don’t interact with chat. Personally I use yt-dlp with mpv and have the buffer set very large. This allows me to pause the stream when I take a toilet break or similar. When I come back I can also skip ahead through ads or idle times on the stream, or watch at increased speed to catch up if needed.
- remram 3y ago
  You're saying "exactly' but then state the opposite...
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    Clearly I misinterpreted what the post I was replying to meant by "stutters". More importantly, I misread that post's "Yes, absolutely. Vastly. Hugely." as a response to the rest of the post before that, rather than a response to the question at the end of "Am I in the minority here?". I was thinking of experiences on YouTube where it refuses to buffer enough to allow playing the whole video, leading to inevitable stutters.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > I'd much rather wait a minute and buffer more video at reasonable resolution and bitrate, rather than switching to something unwatchable. A full minute of buffering would only give about 5% more bandwidth for a typical 22 minute TV show. That’s not going to transform it from “something unwatchable” to the higher bitrate video you want. It will, however, cause a large majority of people to give up on the stream. The number of people who would actually prefer 1 minute of buffering for negligibly higher quality is almost nonexistent. This is why buffering is futile: Once a stream gets to the point of stopping to buffer, the mismatch between available bandwidth and the encoded bitrate is just too great to reasonably overcome.
  - adriancr 3y ago
    I think you're talking about a different use case then OP. For your point, an example is viewing 1080p on 64kbit/s is unreasonable and nothing will fix it. For OP's point, I can imagine viewing 1080p (10Mbit/s) on a 1Gbit/s connection means a little buffer will solve the need for ABR as random packet loss or minor drops can be recovered with retries seamlessly as opposed to dropping quality to ABR. So buffering is futile only when bandwidth is not sufficient, and even there its questionable, perhaps user might just want to download and view after that's complete rather then have poor quality.
    - IanCal 3y ago
      You still have buffering with abr.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    This might be true on a wired link, but on wifi, it's not unusual to see bandwidth drop well below the mean throughput for 10s of seconds. One minute of buffering is enough to hide those issues. In many cases the quality drops during those times and then never goes back up again, so I'm stuck looking at giant macroblock artifacts for the rest of the movie (unless I hit stop and start playing it over again).
    - kiwijamo 3y ago
pricechild 3y ago
This reminds me of Google search rankings historically(?) favouring sites which loaded quicker. Stories at the time (5-10+ years ago?) reported this to be evident at surprisingly small limits - people not waiting less than a second. I'm not surprised it's a similar tale with video delivery. In my experience, what frustrated me most was predictable stalls every 10s or so. I don't see that much any more.
- izacus 3y ago
  Yep, I believe loading times over 300ms or so already caused a drop of visitors? Funny how react developers completely forgot about that :D

wpm 3y ago

In Halo Master Chief Collection, viewing any of the video terminals that are scattered throughout the game world would boot you out of the game over to some stupid app you had to download. When I first came across this I was already mad, but the kicker was that the app would stream the video, these gorgeous, meticulously crafted and headline featured videos, over HLS and the first few dozen seconds of video were always blocky, blurry messes because my internet at the time was rather slow. No option to download all of the videos ahead of time. No option to force video quality to some higher resolution. Just a big blurry mess. So, I skipped that entire feature of the game and figured I'd have to watch them on YouTube later, where I could force it into 1080p and let it buffer a bit. More annoying even now are the constant "Hey moron, is your video stuttering? Try lowering the quality!" 4head tapping messages I see on Twitch or YouTube when their CDN is taking a shit. I pay good money for 1G/1G symmetric, my PC is 6 feet from my wireless AP. If you can't feed me 6Mbps of live stream at me without stuttering I don't think it's a me problem. If MoQ means an end to or improvement that terrible ABR experience, it can't come quic enough.

QuercusMax 3y ago
Watching anything on Paramount+ gives me 30 seconds of incredibly awful blocky graphics, then it finally gives me full-resolution high quality. Usually it's just the Paramount+ ads that are this awful, but I really wish there was a way to say "spend 20s buffering so I can watch the whole thing in HQ".

Uehreka 3y ago

I think it’s fine as long as the user can opt-out and have the opt-out stick[0]. My problem with YouTube is that I can’t tell them “when I’m not on a metered connection, blast my face with as many pixels, frames and bits of color as possible” and actually have that happen. [0] I say opt-out not opt-in because the audience for ABR is people who wouldn’t know where to find an opt-in button or wouldn’t know that it exists.

kroltan 3y ago
The "Enhancer for YouTube" browser extension has a setting to force assign the resolution to whatever you choose. I was having issues that even if my player indicated it was playing 1440p, it clearly was at most 640p or something like that, complete potatovision. Re-clicking the 1440p option would fix it, and this extension basically does that for you. Good luck on mobile, though lol

KaiserPro 3y ago

> Am I in the minority here? Probably. I used to work in broadcast, so I have been conditioned to seek out the highest quality video I can find. So like you, I will accept buffering for higher quality playback. However I still see people who force 4:3 into 16:9 because it fills the screen, and people who still have motion smoothing on their TV so everything looks like 60fps until the stream breaks. however on mobile, and I just want to see the shitty politician say the shitty thing. I think most people want decent audio with mostly moving pictures. Most people can't see HD at TV distances anyway, so I suspect so long as it sounds good, most people don't notice too much.

andersa 3y ago
TV without motion smoothing is absurdly terrible. Might as well watch the movie in Google Slides. Once they get with the times and record the movies in 120 fps, we can get rid of it.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  24 fps panning shots give me headaches. A small amount of smoothing is essential.
  - andersa 3y ago
    Yes, this is the exact issue. My eyes can't even interpret this as motion sometimes, so it just looks like a juddering mess and I can't really see anything.
- jonathanlydall 3y ago
  I think it’s very subjective as I personally find injected frames makes things look “odd”. It’s also worth mentioning that Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit was shot at double FPS (48 if I recall correctly), and was regarded by many as looking “off”. Based on the fact Hollywood has not made any high FPS movies since, it seems that it was generally regarded as a failed experiment.
  - 3y ago

andersa 3y ago

It depends. If I'm watching a movie, I obviously want the highest quality, and it really annoys me when the app doesn't have a feature to force the quality. Great, that means the movie is canceled and I'll have to try again at some arbitrary later time, because I'm not going to watch it as a blocky mess just because their servers are having a moment. If I'm watching a live stream, I'll take whatever quality currently works. Waiting to buffer it would mean I'm behind everyone else...

jeppesen-io 3y ago

> Am I in the minority here? Yes, and it's not even close. Metrics are clear - stutter/loading will cause many more people to close the window vs lower quality. > I can understand various resolutions and codecs based on user preferences and devices but that's a fixed choice. What are the odds that many of those users who set a preference and forget about it, now are wondering why youtube etc. never works at their coffee shop or when in the back yard where the WiFi is weak? The majority of video on the internet is viewed from wireless networks which always have a chance to vary in quality

anotherhue 3y ago

I'd much rather the audio keep streaming while the video does its thing.

CYR1X 3y ago

The masses aren't great at distinguishing between 1080p and 720p, or 720p and 360p. They don't even know what video codecs are. So no they aren't really going to complain if their 1080p video downs to 360p for 2 seconds.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Aurornis 3y ago

> I'd much rather see the spinning wheel and complain to my provider that I'm not getting what I paid for or check what's going wrong. You are deeply in the minority. People hate buffering because it’s rarely a 1-time event. Once a video starts buffering, it’s usually a sign that something is wrong and it’s not going to continue happening. People have internalized this and will give up quickly once buffering happens. You’re also assuming that the issue would be with your internet provider and that complaining to them will resolve it. Neither of those assumptions are true most of the time. While there are cases of degraded internet downlink performance, the more common failure modes involve people’s WiFi. Borderline connection quality can turn into interruptions when their nearby neighbor starts a download on the same WiFi channel, or if someone in the same house starts using the WiFi at the same time.

boneitis 3y ago

(This is all to say that I 100% feel the same way.) I like getting feedback. I don't like when platforms try to smooth out the rough edges invisibly... they often end up in me experiencing breaking problems without my realizing I am experiencing breaking problems. It extends so much farther than having the choice to force a video feed resolution. I don't like when voice and video channels "seamlessly" pitchshift and speed-up/slow-down (at least, without indication). I already find it unacceptable how aggressively most platforms like to compress sound in their audio codecs, presumably in the name of saving bandwidth. Slack application going 1000% out of their way to never let you know that it has a connection drop, so you never know if it re-established comms when you know your net dropped out for a moment, or if you need to hard refresh with Ctrl+R, because you heard the Slack notification on the phone right next to you, but you can't tell whether the desktop app has received the latest messages (often, it hasn't). In all seriousness, I would love something where my computer lcd subtly shades red or blue along the edges of the display depending on when I'm getting network jitter/latency and when it's catching up, and things like that. How cool would that be?

HumblyTossed 3y ago

> Am I in the minority here? Yes, actually.