10 ms·

I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watchi

I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me. Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Regardless, I could not stop thinking how having physical media would avoid these drops.

everforward 2y ago
Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches. I find it roughly equal as things go. The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer. That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while. The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.
- Macha 2y ago
  I remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length). But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive. Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time. Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. If you're using the web player and manually set the quality, it should never downgrade the quality during playback. If your connection is too slow it'll just pause while it tries to buffer
    - Macha 2y ago
      This was ~5 years ago, all I can say was that it was definitely not the case then.
  - alisonatwork 2y ago
    I'm so happy someone has explained this, because it's a problem that has bothered me for years and I always assumed it was an issue on my end. It's incredibly annoying when you can't make out what's happening in a video, set a higher bitrate then pause to wait for it to download, and it just freezes a couple seconds past the current point, which ends up making the whole video unwatchable. I don't know what kind of internet these Google engineers are working with, but for people on shared wifi, or in dense urban areas where there is a lot of interference, or tethering to a 4G phone, or sitting on a train, or a mountain, or using a VPN, or living in a country where the government messes with the traffic, it just isn't realistic to expect users to have a fat pipe that never drops out.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Also, if it's a TV, they typically don't have disks, or at least not disks large enough, fast enough, and write wear tolerant enough, to cache data.
  - everforward 2y ago
    Is this still true in the age of the smart TV? I’ve never looked but always presumed they had essentially the guts of a crappy Android phone with the radio transceivers replaced. They get apps and updates now so I would’ve assumed some semi-reliable persistent storage. This really doesn’t even need to be persistent; resetting on reboot would be perfectly fine. I’ve no doubt they would struggle to cache “real” 4K, but at the bitrate most of this 4K stuff is sent at, 1 GB of cache should be at least 5 minutes. Netflix recommends at least 15 Mbps for 4K streaming. Even doubled to 30Mbps, that’s ~4MB/s, or about 256 seconds of content cached per GB.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>I absolutely need a wired connection You do.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
  Depending on who you ask, requirements per 4K UHD stream are about 25-30Mb/s. This is not a number that any kind of modern wifi should have difficulty keeping up with. I have absolutely no problems with 4K UHD streaming over wifi; mixture of Wifi 6 and 6E throughout. In fact, Wifi 6E is usually faster than wired GigE.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    I routinely cap out at ~10MB/s over 5GHz Wifi 6 (wireless AX). This obviously depends on your hardware and environment, but needless to say I always just connect good old copper if I need speed. Also: Do not trust those "<four digits> mbps over wifi!" claims on marketing, they're all worthless horseshit. The numbers are derived from ideal conditions you would never find in the real world.
    - NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
      I mean, I literally see 1.2Gb/s over Wifi 6E from my MacBook Air M3 to my NAS, which is more than I get over wired GigE. So that's not marketing, that's (very-micro) real-world benchmarking. I do live in a house on a 1.5 acre parcel, so I'm not getting much congestion on the Wifi bands. Even so, I would regularly get 400Mb/s on Wifi 6 in our condo in NY where you could see 30 or more networks.
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        I do nightly backups of my critical machines to a central server, some are connected wirelessly. The server is obviously hard wired. Whereas the wired ones upload their backups at full gigabit speed (~100MB/s including overhead), the wireless ones only ever upload at ~10MB/s. I might see it go up to ~30MB/s if I'm lucky, but we're talking pigs flying over blue moons. The wireless machines range from "one wall away" to "other side of the bloody house", but they're all the same. Even if I get one one sitting right next to the router it won't do more than ~10MB/s. I'm also located in the middle of nowhere in terms of EMI, so the air is clear. Wireless is bullshit. If you need speed, just run copper and save yourself the grief. You only use wireless when the convenience of not running copper and/or being mobile trumps the lack of speed and reliability.

everforward 2y ago

Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches. I find it roughly equal as things go. The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer. That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while. The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.

Macha 2y ago
I remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length). But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive. Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time. Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.
- gruez 2y ago
  >YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. If you're using the web player and manually set the quality, it should never downgrade the quality during playback. If your connection is too slow it'll just pause while it tries to buffer
  - Macha 2y ago
    This was ~5 years ago, all I can say was that it was definitely not the case then.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  I'm so happy someone has explained this, because it's a problem that has bothered me for years and I always assumed it was an issue on my end. It's incredibly annoying when you can't make out what's happening in a video, set a higher bitrate then pause to wait for it to download, and it just freezes a couple seconds past the current point, which ends up making the whole video unwatchable. I don't know what kind of internet these Google engineers are working with, but for people on shared wifi, or in dense urban areas where there is a lot of interference, or tethering to a 4G phone, or sitting on a train, or a mountain, or using a VPN, or living in a country where the government messes with the traffic, it just isn't realistic to expect users to have a fat pipe that never drops out.
actionfromafar 2y ago
Also, if it's a TV, they typically don't have disks, or at least not disks large enough, fast enough, and write wear tolerant enough, to cache data.
- everforward 2y ago
  Is this still true in the age of the smart TV? I’ve never looked but always presumed they had essentially the guts of a crappy Android phone with the radio transceivers replaced. They get apps and updates now so I would’ve assumed some semi-reliable persistent storage. This really doesn’t even need to be persistent; resetting on reboot would be perfectly fine. I’ve no doubt they would struggle to cache “real” 4K, but at the bitrate most of this 4K stuff is sent at, 1 GB of cache should be at least 5 minutes. Netflix recommends at least 15 Mbps for 4K streaming. Even doubled to 30Mbps, that’s ~4MB/s, or about 256 seconds of content cached per GB.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>I absolutely need a wired connection You do.

NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
Depending on who you ask, requirements per 4K UHD stream are about 25-30Mb/s. This is not a number that any kind of modern wifi should have difficulty keeping up with. I have absolutely no problems with 4K UHD streaming over wifi; mixture of Wifi 6 and 6E throughout. In fact, Wifi 6E is usually faster than wired GigE.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I routinely cap out at ~10MB/s over 5GHz Wifi 6 (wireless AX). This obviously depends on your hardware and environment, but needless to say I always just connect good old copper if I need speed. Also: Do not trust those "<four digits> mbps over wifi!" claims on marketing, they're all worthless horseshit. The numbers are derived from ideal conditions you would never find in the real world.
  - NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
    I mean, I literally see 1.2Gb/s over Wifi 6E from my MacBook Air M3 to my NAS, which is more than I get over wired GigE. So that's not marketing, that's (very-micro) real-world benchmarking. I do live in a house on a 1.5 acre parcel, so I'm not getting much congestion on the Wifi bands. Even so, I would regularly get 400Mb/s on Wifi 6 in our condo in NY where you could see 30 or more networks.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      I do nightly backups of my critical machines to a central server, some are connected wirelessly. The server is obviously hard wired. Whereas the wired ones upload their backups at full gigabit speed (~100MB/s including overhead), the wireless ones only ever upload at ~10MB/s. I might see it go up to ~30MB/s if I'm lucky, but we're talking pigs flying over blue moons. The wireless machines range from "one wall away" to "other side of the bloody house", but they're all the same. Even if I get one one sitting right next to the router it won't do more than ~10MB/s. I'm also located in the middle of nowhere in terms of EMI, so the air is clear. Wireless is bullshit. If you need speed, just run copper and save yourself the grief. You only use wireless when the convenience of not running copper and/or being mobile trumps the lack of speed and reliability.