24 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Addressing the new video player
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 kitty-_cat at 02/08/2021 at 18:05 UTC
12 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Can you also make it cache those? There's many times I watch a video and it loads in at high quality the first time, the when I go to show someone it starts loading over again when it replays and ends up low res as hell. If it loads successfully the first time why re load during successive playbacks