YouTube Player Beta Autodetects Bandwidth?
May 1, 2008 by Mike Abundo
Filed under Computers
At first, I couldn’t see the difference between the old YouTube player and the new YouTube player beta, other than the obvious cosmetic differences in the control bar and related videos. Then I looked below the video.
The old YouTube player has a quality switch…
…while the new one does not.
YouTube’s Steve Chen earlier promised a player that automatically switches quality depending on detected bandwidth. Could this be that player? Wonder when they’ll push this out to embeds.
That makes a sense!
Thank you for the link, i am going to add your finding on our post :)
You know, with the old player I could open a couple of videos in tabs and press PAUSE or the REWIND button to stop the videos and wait for them to finish loading, now you actually have to wait for the video to start playing to stop it.
Maybe for high speed connections it’s not an issue, but sometimes I’d like to load a bunch of videos while I’m reading something and then watch them knowing they’re not gonna freeze halfway through…
Not sure how to tell this to the dev team, though…
Check in your My Account settings, you can set your default bandwidth method. By default, it’s in “auto-detect” mode, I set mine to High-Bandwidth always.
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I agree @Julian, the new player won’t let you do those anymore, and it is very annoying. But for fairness sake, there are times when it works.
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I think this is YouTube’s answer to “Corporate Blocks” of their service. If you ask many ICT experts, they ban YouTube only most of the time and not the other video hosts like Veoh.com. The reason that they always give is the fact that YouTube’s site:
1) is on Auto-Play mode
2) doesn’t care about your bandwidth - it will eat all bandwidth it can use - ie it doesn’t buffer at all - you are literally downloading the file and your PC plays it.
Unlike other video hosts, the video is streamed not downloaded, so they have to ‘buffer’, hence, less bandwidth.
Now, don’t ask me the details, that’s just want most corporate ICT’s I’ve talked to told me :p