

Ask HN: A start-loading button for videos? - cool-RR

(Reposting.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>What do you think?
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nostrademons
Most 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.

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cool-RR
There'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
I'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).

