
4 Out of 5 Viewers Leave If a Stream Buffers Once  - mjfern
http://newteevee.com/2009/12/10/4-out-of-5-viewers-leave-if-a-stream-buffers-once/
======
cschep
It's doubly true when I'm positive it's not just my connection being slow. 20
megabits down should be plenty for youtube.

~~~
nostrademons
I suspect that the vast majority of YouTube buffering failures are caused by
Flash. Oftentimes if you fast-forward (drag the slider) past the buffering
point, the movie will continue playing fine. That shouldn't even be possible
if the problem was that the movie hadn't downloaded.

~~~
DarkShikari
The problems are caused by Youtube's extremely heavy throttling and also the
rules that Youtube sets on client side buffering, not Flash. Flash allows
rather significant customization of buffer behavior; I've equally seen cases
where Flash was used for streaming with total latency below 200ms.

At one point early on after the throttling was introduced, it was so badly
done that normal videos would buffer all the time because the amount of
bandwidth they allocated to the throttler was less than the bitrate of the
actual videos.

------
dangrover
I think it'd be neat if I could replace all the FLV players with a good one
like the Youtube one or the Hulu one.

They often suck in that:

1) They're shitty at predicting the optimum buffer size

2) They do not continue buffering when paused, or do not indicate whether they
are buffering.

3) The behavior for the connection failing in the middle of a pre-roll ad is
different for the connection failing in the actual content, sometimes leaving
it stuck

4) They do not always allow random access in the video, and when they do,
sometimes they have to reload a portion of the video that you've already seen.

5) On some of my Macs, fullscreen viewing mode is vastly slower and more CPU
intensive than just using the zoom feature in Universal Access.

~~~
DarkShikari
_1) They're shitty at predicting the optimum buffer size_

This is set by the website owner, not the FLV player. For many (JW,
Flowplayer, etc) it's a parameter in the HTML.

 _2) They do not continue buffering when paused_

I haven't seen a player that doesn't continue buffering when paused. If there
is one, it must really, really suck. This might also be the case with using
RTMP streaming instead of progressive download, which is just plain stupid for
anything that isn't live content.

 _4) They do not always allow random access in the video, and when they do,
sometimes they have to reload a portion of the video that you've already
seen._

Random access requires either using hinted FLVs (with FLVtool++) or
mod_h264streaming for MP4 files, so it's not surprising that some websites
don't do the necessary extra step.

 _5) On some of my Macs, fullscreen viewing mode is vastly slower and more CPU
intensive than just using the zoom feature in Universal Access._

Flash's rendering code is notoriously bad; it does basically everything in
software, in part because of the unpredictability of video drivers and so
forth. AFAIK, the website owner has to set Flash's hardware acceleration mode
on (it's off by default), and even then it only applies in fullscreen mode.

~~~
dangrover
Interesting! Way more variables site owners have to control than I thought.

~~~
DarkShikari
And even more than they think--Flash has a number of "hidden" variables that
are either only exposed to the official media server, or are even exposed (or
at least documented) only to specific major customers.

------
carterschonwald
Well, this is because (at least as far as I've observed), the probability of
having many many buffers is far greater for each time a buffer has already
happened. Accordingly those who value their time will go elsewhere

~~~
PebblesRox
I agree: in my experience on Youtube, most videos that buffer at all will do
it many times. I don't mind the waiting so much as the constant interruption.

------
jsz0
Sounds reasonable to me. People have high expectations for video. They've been
conditioned on DVDs or traditional subscription television services. One very
simple technique that would help is to fade the audio out when the buffer is
empty and fade it back in to resume. If not completely then just enough to
smooth out the jarring stop/start of audio. To me this is the digital version
of nails on a chalk board. I can't stand it.

------
forensic
We need to use this to pressure giant marketers so they will pressure ISPs to
improve net performance.

------
phren0logy
This may also reflect the quality of the content...

------
timf
Assuming a good portion of the streams analyzed were from CDNs, this is the
second time recently I've seen Limelight get a great rating from a significant
study (I can't find the other one offhand).

------
access_denied
Bad usability not only sucks in a "this sucks, but let suck it up anyway" way,
bad usability sucks in a big way, like "this sucks!". It's only bad culture
that lets you esteem otherwise.

