Enable full video buffering

[coolbr3eze]

First let me say this may be in the wrong area.

Recently I moved and subsequently had to downgrade my internet, this isn't much of a problem unless I have large downloads or something, most of my internet uses have been virtually unaffected to include my gaming, I play Ghost Recon Wildlands, LoL, ESO, Battlefield 1,ect... and have no problems. I have noticed a significant change when I stream videos though. There are times when the video takes forever to buffer and move on. In the past when I had terrible internet I would simply load the video and then disappear for a while and let it buffer and once it was done I would watch my video in peace, however that doesn't seem to be the case now. No matter how long I leave it, I tried a full hour once, it will not buffer more than maybe 5% more of the total video length. It won't completely buffer the video so it keeps pausing in order to buffer and re-buffer.

All that to say, is there a way to make the videos buffer all the way again?

I believe I read somewhere that it was due to a code change on the server side to allow for better streaming due to lower bandwidth usage or some such but if there is a way to allow full buffer I don't mind my bandwidth getting used up at all.

As a note, this is not Youtube that I am trying to watch this on. I very rarely, if ever, use Youtube, I am talking about other streaming sites.

Thanks in advance for any information!

 

[bill001g]

As you suspect it is the server side that is in control. There is little you can do if they do not have options to change the buffer size. The buffers really are not meant to solve the problem of too little download bandwidth. They are used to solve the problem of small periods of time where the bandwidth drops and would cause a stall.

No matter what you do you can't really fix the problem of having so say watch video that requires 10mbps but you have 5bps. Sure you could download 1/2 the movie and watch it while the other have downloads but that is not how they designed their system. Partially I suspect this is related to what "streaming" is defined in their contracts with the owners of the movies. If they let you download the whole movie and watch it would be closer to a sale of the movie rather than you just watching it.

Now if you are really good at programming you might be able to hack something. Since the data is sent to your machine there technically is nothing that prevents you from saving it and playing back the file at a later time. It all depends to how much effort they have gone to prevent you from doing that. If the encrypt the data stream with something other than https you can not play it back even if you capture it.

 

[coolbr3eze]

I was somewhat afraid that this was what was going on. Darn modern technology, keeps moving on and leaving people stuck in the early days.