Comment by Watchful1 on 02/08/2021 at 17:38 UTC

42 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)

View submission: Addressing the new video player

In my experience, the absolute biggest problem with the video player is that it does not immediately serve the highest quality of video my device/connection can support. I get a blurry 240p video for 10 seconds, then it updates with the high quality stream. I would much rather wait an extra 2 seconds to get high quality the whole way through.

Things like play/pause button location, how the comments look, etc, are not nearly as important as the video player actually being able to play the video I want.

Replies

Comment by Sn00byD00 at 02/08/2021 at 17:54 UTC

21 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thanks for bringing this up, it’s something we’re looking into. Right now, Reddit serves all videos using HLS[1]. (Think, Netflix today vs. YouTube circa 2007.) Basically, we serve every video in chunks so that you can continue to have playback, even if your connection is dodgy or your device is funky. This makes sense for really long videos (like Netflix movies). It doesn’t really make sense for shorter videos because, as you mention, most users probably prefer to wait the extra few seconds to get the entire video in high quality. We’re planning to update the video platform to not use HLS for all videos; the exact threshold of whether or not to use HLS will depend on various factors, so we’re still working on figuring this all out. Making fixes like this faster is exactly why we’re making the change to the new video player.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Comment by [deleted] at 02/08/2021 at 18:14 UTC*

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This account is no longer active.

The comments and submissions have been purged as one final 'thank you' to reddit for being such a hostile platform towards developers, mods, and users.

Reddit as a company has slowly lost touch with what made it a great platform for so long. Some great features of reddit in 2023:

• Killing 3rd party apps

• Continuously rolling out features that negatively impact mods and users alike with no warning or consideration of feedback

• Hosting hateful communities and users

• Poor communication and a long history of not following through with promised improvements

• Complete lack of respect for the hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours put into keeping their site running

Comment by fuzzypercentage at 02/08/2021 at 17:47 UTC

0 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Device/platform?