4 ms·
Ask HN: A start-loading button for videos?
(Reposting.)
I thought of an idea: Online videos should have a button, "Start loading", which makes the video start loading.
Personally, when I come across a video I want to see, I usually hit play and then immediately pause, then go read something else, so the video will be completely loaded when I start watching it. And it's annoying to do that, especially because sometimes it takes time until the pause button shows.
So I suggest a "Start loading" button that will cause the widget to start downloading the video. It will disappear the moment it is pressed or "play" is pressed.
What do you think?
- nostrademons 17y agoMost videos start loading in the background as soon as the Flash embed loads. Or at least, they should - I've heard the YouTube team complain of bugs in Flash player that sometimes break the load. This makes much more sense than a manual "start loading" button, though, since it requires no manual intervention and loads the video with unused bandwidth as soon as possible.
- cool-RR 17y agoThere's a problem with that, when you're visiting a site which has several (possibly many) videos embedded in the same page. I know some good sites that are like this. You don't want to have them all starting to load, because then they'd take a lot of bandwidth and you'd have to wait too much to see the first video.
- nostrademons 17y agoI'd rather video sites optimize for the common case of one video on a blog. If there're multiple videos, I can always click on them to take me to the original video page, where just one is loading. Or open that one video in a new tab and hit Stop on the page with all the videos (which should pause loading of all Flash embeds, though I'm not sure it does with the current Flash player).