Every guy on this earth and a very large population of women can agree that browsing porn sites are better than Youtube. Youtube just added a feature that lets you see frames from within the video, but I saw that on porn sites ages ago. Also, some sites have previews of the video (like gifs instead of just one pic of the clip) and there’s no issue going from normal to fullscreen mid video. Why do porn sites have a better UI than Google?
It’s because Porn companies have always been quicker to adapt to technology than traditional tech companies. They do so to remain competitive within their industry. YouTube is too big to make quick changes without it having to risk annoying users on UI.
Youtube’s biggest problem is continuing to recommend videos that have 100% downvotes because they’re fake. And also the fact that their in site search tool sucks balls. I use google to find the youtube videos I want. But that doesn’t mean youtube respond me back with what I am searching for every time.
Trying to switch to full screen is the worst part. Sometimes it turns the entire screen green, and every time it has to reload part of it because the resolution changed.
Why can’t there be a setting to load the video in 480p by default?
We all know that there are many sites provide HD video quality streaming. one of them is Vimeo. Vimeo is aiming for a very different market than youtube. You couldn’t get away with uploading a famous song you like or anything like that. Not sure if they still do, but they used to screen uploads to make sure they meet their standards. Vimeo is jam-packed with amateur self-made music videos. That’s the point, that they’re self-made instead of a ton of episodes of Grays Anatomy excised and remixed and set to some even more forgettable indie rock track than whatever was originally under the episode.
Auto Start:
What really amazes me is the situation with auto-starting. No video streaming site that I know of, porn or otherwise, has gotten it right. Either the video starts playing as soon as the page loads, or it doesn’t play OR load until I click the play button. Isn’t it obvious that the right way to do this is to load the video with the page, but only start playing after I have clicked the play button? When I open a bunch of videos in background tabs, I want to see them loaded and ready to play by the time I get to them. I don’t want to have to click through all the tabs and pause each video individually — even worse if I have to start the videos first so they could buffer.
Buffering:
Another feature that I think is long overdue is non-contiguous buffering. Say a large chunk of the video has loaded, but then I decide to skip to a part that has not yet loaded. Every video player I have ever used just loses the buffered chunk. Why?! Why does the buffered part have to be one continuous segment? There are no technical reasons for that. It can only be explained by laziness. Hell, I’ve seen some video players rewind to the beginning of the video after it ended and start buffering it all over again. Wtf?
Where do you think youtube came from? The originators of youtube took the ideas that porn sites had already been doing for a few years and made a player for everyone else. Then took all the credit while falling horribly behind the tech of the porn sites. Where do you think most of the major improvements on the web have come from? Its all from porn.
It’s also cool how most people don’t know companies like Comcast got started by selling porn in hotels. They would install cable tv pay per view porn in hotel rooms charging the hotel very little for the systems and making bank off the porn. They then started selling the tv to homes, taking a large portion of the money to do so from the porn they sold to hotels. It was at this time that pays per view non-porn movies debuted but porn was the start.
Increasing bandwidth demands of porn sites caused the increase in bandwidth for the growing internet. Without the porn being one of the early adopters. There wouldn’t have been a need, at the time, for such speeds.
One of my friends worked in the internet porn industry for 10 years from 1999-2009 and have seen every major improvement in porn first, then the rest of the web catches up.
I’ve worked in web development, just never for the porn industry. I think those porn websites (especially those free video collection sites) generally have a higher profit margin because they show more ads, porn ads, and intrusive ads (popup/popunder). They also have a lot of users, but I’m pretty sure YouTube has more users, who more frequently use the service.
Taking both together I suppose that porn website has fewer issues affording the servers and can, therefore, improve the user experience more. The latter is especially needed considering the vast amount of competition out there, while YouTube is miles ahead of its competition in users and social functionality.
All the issues mentioned by the OP in the video player are there to reduce the load on the server. Adding and automatically creating animated gifs of videos and seeing frames within the video take up more bandwidth (and arguably server space). When going fullscreen the video changes quality but doesn’t load the entire video again for that. YouTube is adding some of those features, but that’s most likely because it fits in what they can pay for the servers, or they’ve found ways to reduce bandwidth.
Porn websites are an entirely different beast than your average websites. The customers use a TON of bandwidth and there are many different clients hitting the box for large amounts of bandwidth 24/7. Porn had to make the sites as efficient as they could to handle this totally different kind of bandwidth usage that other kinds of sites could not handle. Advancements in apache web server and Linux came about from porn sites wanting to get the possible users on a single box and FAST. Sites like youtube take the other approach… throw thousands of boxes at it and it doesn’t matter if each box is slow cause together they can handle it. Porn sites, on the other hand, try to make things more efficient so they can maximize profits.
Porn has driven media since pretty much forever.
Seriously, examples include:
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Pietro Aretino wrote one of the earliest mass-produced books. It was an illustrated book of sonnets that explicitly described various sexual positions. Your great-great-great-x10 granddad probably learned to read for masturbation purposes.
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Broadband Internet. Broadband became commonplace long before iTunes, before Youtube, before Flickr. Estimates suggest that circa 2000-2001, 80% of Internet traffic was porn. So, if your dad wanted broadband back then and your mum couldn’t figure out why – now you know.
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Sex.com was up, running and making good money years before you could buy your groceries online. The same man founded match.com; the man who brought porn to the Internet also brought lonely hearts ads to the Internet. Could make a good talking point with your next date.
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Porn sites were streaming video years before Youtube was even founded.
Caching:
Nowadays caching works for highly watched content. In porn, people tend to watch the same content over and over which get cached on edge servers. If you’re watching a random youtube movie that no one gives a damn about, you’re probably getting redirected back to youtube’s origin servers to retrieve the video. Also, with youtube videos and the massive amount of new videos coming in all the time, the age of the videos are probably set really low. The age is how long the video will be cached on their servers. They don’t “mirror” all the content, it simply costs too much in terms of hardware. It gets redirected a bunch of times in order to get the stuff you want.
If you still think that youtube video player sucks. Do let me know what features you want in near future youtube to consider in comments section. Till then happy surfing 😉