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> In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file b

> In addition subtitles, secondary audio, descriptive video, and multi-view video etc. are all things which we mandate by law which do not work well in a file base expierenced. That's just not true - VLC has many more features than all the web-based (or "app"-based) popular streaming players. Granted, I checked and my VLC does not have "thumbnail scrubbing", but although that is nice, I don't think this is a big deal and if it's really popular, it will be added to VLC (or it may already be there, I did not check).

JohnBooty 7y ago
I'm a big fan of torrents and would prefer them to streams! I'm a bit of a data hoarder. But there are clear reasons why Netflix et al don't simply have you downloading massive files. It would definitely be simpler, but that doesn't mean it's an adequate engineering choice. Lot of smart people working there and they don't jump through all those extra hoops just for fun. 1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files) That's the way it was designed to work. Otherwise, the bits at the beginning of the file would be much more common amongst your non-seeding peers and the bits at the end would be much rarer amongst your non-seeding peers. Your downloads would start crazy fast and would get progressively slower. Some clients let you abuse the protocol and "stream" torrents sequentially, but if significant percentages of torrenters (such as literally every Netflix user, in an imaginary world where Netflix simply served everything via torrents) did that it would be an issue. That's a great way to deliver big files in their entirety via P2P, but that is pretty much the pathological opposite of what is requred for streaming. For streaming you obviously need that sequential access. You need to optimize for the beginning of the file, since people want to start watching right away. People do not want to wait 60 or 30 or even 10 seconds for a YouTube vid to start streaming. 2. Think about your actual viewing habits. How many times have you watched the first 1% of a video on YouTube or Netflix, and then decided to watch something else instead? Even if we (probably generously) assume most users watch an average of 50% of a given video (I suspect it's much less) that's still 2x wasted bandwidth per video, on average, if video providers blasted out entire files. Netflix's infrastructure (or rather, their AWS monthly bill) is massive already. Imagine it being asked to blast out 2 or 5 or 10x as much data per video as it's already doing. 3. There's also the rather important matter of many (most?) playback devices not having huge gobs of local storage with which to hold complete movie downloads. I've got probably 20TB of hard drives scattered around this place, but that's not the norm. 4. Can't adapt to changing bandwidth conditions by scaling video quality up and down midstream. Personally, I wish I had more control over this as a customer, as sometimes I'd rather just wait than watch a compromised stream, but Average Joe is not going to want to muck around with that sort of choice, or even understand what it means.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. That's just not true. I've used uTorrent, and I recall deciding whether I wanted to stream or not. It worked well too.
  - afiori 7y ago
    This is addressed as "abusing the protocol"
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      And given that most popular clients allow you to, this because worthy of the "95% theoretical problem" title.
    - m-p-3 7y ago
      How is it abusing the protocol if it allows you to do it?
- butteroverflow 7y ago
  Of course you can. Every modern BitTorrent client allows you to download file pieces by their order. IIRC it has been a solved problem for at least 8 years.
  - JohnBooty 7y ago
    That's abuse of the protocol. If a small number of people do it, no problem. If everybody did it, that would be a big problem. More to the original poster's point, my post answer's the posters question of "why doesn't YouTube just offer file downloads like Bittorrent?" There are many clear reasons why; my post gave one of the more prominent ones.
    - cyberbanjo 7y ago
      Why is that abuse of the protocol?

JohnBooty 7y ago

I'm a big fan of torrents and would prefer them to streams! I'm a bit of a data hoarder. But there are clear reasons why Netflix et al don't simply have you downloading massive files. It would definitely be simpler, but that doesn't mean it's an adequate engineering choice. Lot of smart people working there and they don't jump through all those extra hoops just for fun. 1. You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. (Well, maybe 95% complete, depending on how tolerant you and your software are when it comes to malformed files) That's the way it was designed to work. Otherwise, the bits at the beginning of the file would be much more common amongst your non-seeding peers and the bits at the end would be much rarer amongst your non-seeding peers. Your downloads would start crazy fast and would get progressively slower. Some clients let you abuse the protocol and "stream" torrents sequentially, but if significant percentages of torrenters (such as literally every Netflix user, in an imaginary world where Netflix simply served everything via torrents) did that it would be an issue. That's a great way to deliver big files in their entirety via P2P, but that is pretty much the pathological opposite of what is requred for streaming. For streaming you obviously need that sequential access. You need to optimize for the beginning of the file, since people want to start watching right away. People do not want to wait 60 or 30 or even 10 seconds for a YouTube vid to start streaming. 2. Think about your actual viewing habits. How many times have you watched the first 1% of a video on YouTube or Netflix, and then decided to watch something else instead? Even if we (probably generously) assume most users watch an average of 50% of a given video (I suspect it's much less) that's still 2x wasted bandwidth per video, on average, if video providers blasted out entire files. Netflix's infrastructure (or rather, their AWS monthly bill) is massive already. Imagine it being asked to blast out 2 or 5 or 10x as much data per video as it's already doing. 3. There's also the rather important matter of many (most?) playback devices not having huge gobs of local storage with which to hold complete movie downloads. I've got probably 20TB of hard drives scattered around this place, but that's not the norm. 4. Can't adapt to changing bandwidth conditions by scaling video quality up and down midstream. Personally, I wish I had more control over this as a customer, as sometimes I'd rather just wait than watch a compromised stream, but Average Joe is not going to want to muck around with that sort of choice, or even understand what it means.

paulddraper 7y ago
> You can't play a torrented file until the download is 100% complete. That's just not true. I've used uTorrent, and I recall deciding whether I wanted to stream or not. It worked well too.
- afiori 7y ago
  This is addressed as "abusing the protocol"
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    And given that most popular clients allow you to, this because worthy of the "95% theoretical problem" title.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    How is it abusing the protocol if it allows you to do it?
butteroverflow 7y ago
Of course you can. Every modern BitTorrent client allows you to download file pieces by their order. IIRC it has been a solved problem for at least 8 years.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  That's abuse of the protocol. If a small number of people do it, no problem. If everybody did it, that would be a big problem. More to the original poster's point, my post answer's the posters question of "why doesn't YouTube just offer file downloads like Bittorrent?" There are many clear reasons why; my post gave one of the more prominent ones.
  - cyberbanjo 7y ago
    Why is that abuse of the protocol?