If I watch to 1:20 in then click back to 1:00 the video will load, but if I’ve already watched that part wouldn’t it be “stored” on my side of the browser?
In: Technology
Nope. In the olden days it did but with modern browsers you only cache a small part of the video. You aren’t downloading the whole thing.
Videos use a ton of storage. A 30 minute 4K video can be multiple *gigabytes* in size, and your browser isn’t going to let a single site use that much memory/disk space. So only small chunks of the video are stored in the buffer, and thrown away when you have watched it.
Depending on how high resolution the video you’re watching is; no, probably not. Your PC likely can’t have the entire video cached at once.
Also consider if you’re doing other things at the same time, your PC will likely decide to drop already-played video out of memory to make space to use that memory for other things.
One hour of video at 1080p is about 1.5GB.
One hour of video at 4k is about 20GB.
Neither of these figures include the accompanying audio, which adds a bit more on top.
videos are cached into ram. Ram is small, videos are big and people are already complaining about browser ram usage.
So when you are done watching a cached part of video, the browser chucks it and uses the space to cache the next section of video.
Seeking backwards is generally not expected, so it generally doesnt cause a problem, therefore it is considered fine
Your player only keeps so big of a buffer, usually a small number of seconds to prevent jitter due to lag at the source. By the time you’re at 1:20 it’s already erased what it had in memory for 1:00, so it has to fetch it again when you go back.
You can control the buffer size with some players. For example, VLC defaults to a 1.5 second buffer, but you can increase it to whatever you want as long as you have enough memory on your computer.
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