– Why, when on a slow connection, does a video often manage to play through once, but have difficulty replaying?

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– Why, when on a slow connection, does a video often manage to play through once, but have difficulty replaying?

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

What site are you talking about? YouTube? I’ve never seen this happen.

For long videos (3 minutes+) your computer saves some memory by forgetting about the beginning of the video that you have already seen. Therefore if you go back to watch the video again it could have to redownload what it forgot. But it shouldn’t be slower the second time. If anything it should be faster because the video will now be cached on the server and you don’t need to reestablish a connection.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Depending on the size of the video, your device’s memory, and sometimes on the video player and video format, your computer/tablet/phone might not be holding the *entire* video in memory for instant replay.

It’s often the case, when streaming for example, for the video player to only hold 10 or 15 or 30 seconds of previous video in memory (often called the “buffer”). Which means, if you go back further than that, your computer will need to redownload that information again before it can be viewed.

Other factors can be at play too; or some of the previous suggestions may not need be worried at all – it very much depends on a few details. But they are the most likely things to be encountered by the layman

Anonymous 0 Comments

Reddit has the worst video caching, ever. Video routinely plays through once, then “hey watch this video”, …buffering, “oh, nevermind.” The data made it to my device, but now it’s gone and the Reddit app needs to consume more metered data to replay it? Pausing doesn’t cause pre-buffering for slow connections, instead auto chooses lowest res possible so captions are illegible. Fix your app Reddit!