I have always noticed that rewinding a video even for 15 seconds takes a lot more time to buffer in any app than forwarding it even by 1 minute, why is it so?
Isn’t the previous one already loaded and so should appear instantaneously?
In: Technology
Rewinding is not considered a common action and in designing (consumer) video streaming software. Rewind performance is often sacrificed for making everything else faster and more efficient.
A common example of such trade of involves prefetching video from the servers (slow) storage(HDD) into its (fast) RAM, before it’s transmitted. After transmission, the cached bit of video in RAM is freed.
Well that is a gross simplification. There is on top of that a few more wrinkles to do with multiple video streams on the server and different layers of caching. These effect add up to make the hit to your playback fairly significant.
There do exist video systems meant for interactively jumping around a video stored remotely.They are typically used by production or security companies. They are not as efficient at serving many videos to a large user base.
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