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I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data. It's absolutel
by Tabular-Iceberg 10mo ago
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
- dev0p 10mo agoYouTube should have been a distributed p2p system with local storage of your favorite videos. A man can dream...
- amelius 10mo agoDidn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an early advantage).
- gbin 10mo agoGuess why it was asymmetrical in the first place ... Telcos wanted to sell the upload bandwidth to streaming companies. Another double dipping Telco monopoly squeeze and customer boxing / enshitification from very early on.
- Tabular-Iceberg 10mo agoI thought it was just trading more download for less upload when last mile bandwidth was limited by re-using old POTS copper. Wasn't dialup largely asymmetric too? I don't think p2p streaming was even on the radar back then.
- dev0p 10mo agoNow largely more feasible. We should try again.
- jasomill 10mo ago1000/40 is rather asymmetric and the fastest service available in my area.
- throwaway94275 10mo ago1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it. Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
- fragmede 10mo ago"Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage to achieve.
- lenkite 10mo ago"Fitting into my carry-bag so I can use it in line at the post office" is already possible for a PC and many people do it all the time.
- fragmede 10mo agoThat's not remotely true. The only person I've ever seen in public using something like https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to STAND in line while using a laptop is me.
- NewsaHackO 10mo agoThat looks like something a dweeb would use, I want one
- zvitiate 10mo agoMy GPD pocket 4 fits into really large cargo pants if that counts lol, and there is the micropc2 too that’s even smaller :p
- fragmede 10mo ago
- psychoslave 10mo agoYes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there. Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are - it's missing snippet previews - it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
- kawsper 10mo agoIt’s not just you. My Firefox, with no extensions, have struggled on YouTube the past weeks. Sometimes I can’t even click on the front page, sometimes when I open a video it refuses to play. I don’t know what’s up, but it works in chrome.
- z500 10mo agoI also had it stop working completely. I thought they finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally install that update I had been sitting on for a while and it just started working again
- niels8472 10mo agoThat may also just be Firefox's way of telling you it has updated and needs to be restarted.
- zelphirkalt 10mo agoProbably just the typical nefarious activities of YouTube. Either "accidentally" driving users to switch browsers, or experimenting with circumventing ad blockers, or negligence in testing, or who knows what. If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim, then they should be obligated to make their services work perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming and manipulating people. One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube frontend.
- guardian5x 10mo agoBack then, the focus was on optimising for the user. Now, however, companies prioritise their own interests over the user.
- vladms 10mo agoIndeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering what I ended up using couple of years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux) /s
- noir_lord 10mo agoThere are myriad ways to optimise for the user, user friendliness is only one of them. As the old joke went "Unix is user friendly, it's particular about who its friends are".
- linguae 10mo agoWe can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
- ndriscoll 10mo agoWe do of course still have this in modern computing with Linux/KDE. Stable, snappy, and does exactly what you ask. The computer doesn't get in your way, nor does it try to get you to do something else. It just does what you tell it to do, immediately.
- thijson 10mo agoI was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
- Marsymars 10mo agoAlso, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
- Telaneo 10mo agoDRM being forced into freeview TV seems like a contradiction in terms, and yet here we are.
- physicsguy 10mo agoRemember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
- reaperducer 10mo agoRemember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998! I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.
- weberer 10mo agoI never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.
- physicsguy 10mo agoThe BBC here used to put a ton of news content on it, it was pretty forward thinking really!
- deltoidmaximus 10mo agoWas RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.
- kalleboo 10mo agoI've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad panes you have to manually disable etc [0] https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png
- Aurornis 10mo ago> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients. The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found. The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
- Tabular-Iceberg 10mo agoI'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
- j1elo 10mo agoYou're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques. There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope. [1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
- 10mo ago
- reaperducer 10mo agoI remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data. I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends. By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
- crtasm 10mo agoYou can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
- usrbinbash 10mo ago> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other. The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other. I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?
- LaGrange 10mo agoRealPlayer was 1995, so a few years later, and arguably was a start of the trend of enshittification. Flash videos was around the times things really got bad. That does mean we go, essentially: Step 1: We barely have video at all. Step 2: Everything is terrible.
- nurettin 10mo agoTechnically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.
- demetris 10mo agoThe standard video element is really nice: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/video https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... I have used it on a couple of client sites, and it works really well. You can even add a thumbnail that shows before the video starts downloading/playing (the poster attribute). :-)
- 10mo ago
- morshu9001 10mo agoAround 2012?, I had some extension that forced YouTube videos to play with Quicktime in-browser, which was leaner. Original file, no conversion.
- armchairhacker 10mo agoA specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser: the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth. Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
- gloosx 10mo agoThe real problem is that YouTube built a model where the platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse for such centralisation.
- armchairhacker 10mo ago> They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetization up to them A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on a VPS.
- bobdvb 10mo agoThere are lots of platforms where people pay for their distribution, but they're not as successful. The main problem is that smaller creators couldn't afford the true cost of hosting and indexing to the level that YT provides. As someone who's spent many years building streaming platforms, the lack of understanding of the economics and this kind of massive over simplification is really sad. There's no conspiracy with YT, they've built a 'wonder of the world' which has a very low barrier to entry and which has paid out billions to creators.
- duped 10mo agoA media business is predicated on exclusive rights over their media. The entire notion of media being freely copied and saved is contrary to their business models. I think there's a healthy debate to be had over whether those models are entitled to exist and how much harm to consumers is tolerable, but it's not really obvious how to create a business that deals in media without some kind of protection over the copying and distribution of that media. I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they represent information that society has granted individuals or businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to regulate the rights over that information. I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and they have a very different view of intellectual property than the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys, because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa mural or something.
- GuB-42 10mo agoExperience with video is excellent for most people. All the complexity is hidden from the end user, unless you are trying to hack something. In the 1990s, streaming effectively didn't exist because people didn't have enough bandwidth (it was mostly dial-up), and there was very little legal offering, and the little that existed was terrible. Home video was limited too, as few people knew how to make video files suitable for online diffusion. Piracy did pretty well, but that's because the legal experience was so terrible. But even then, you had to download obscure players and codec packs, and sourcing wasn't as easy as it is now. For reference VLC and BitTorrent released in 2001. I'd say the user experience steadily improved and peaked in the mid-2010s. I think it is worse now, but if it is worse now, back then, it was terrible, for different reasons.
- a96 10mo agoIt took quite far into the 90's before things like truecolour displays and hardware accelerated video scaling appeared as well. Computers would struggle to view anything bigger than a postage stamp. Hard drive space was also really expensive. It started to change fast towards the end of the decade, though.