technology Youtube madness (HTML5, autoplay, One Channel et.al.)

[Dowlphin 463]

This might be a rant. I'm not in the best mood, and this is the main source of constant annoyance in my day.

Do you know whether Youtube has to pay fees to Adobe for every time the flash player is used, or something like that?
Because it's the only reason I can think of right now that Youtube is shoving that piece of HTML5 junk in people's face against their will.

Describing the flaws of the HTML5 player... I don't even know where to start.
The play bar is playing hide&seek with my mouse cursor, it has no proper fullscreen, it fills my RAM with cached data, it stutters at the preload border, it plays while the button says stop or pause.
Sometimes my Opera browser says there currently is no compatible video format available, and then I have to reload the page until I get the Flash player and can watch the video. Sometimes it says video is currently not available - same solution.
I probably forgot a few points.

THEN there is the bug (?) I have had since I joined Youtube over am month ago that I opt out of the HTML5 trial and it keeps opting me back in randomly. AND more and more often it gives me the HTML5 plague while I AM opted out.

The massive resources the HTML5 player consume and its general messiness can cause my web browser to crash, and when I restart it and suddenly the video pages I had open with flash player (autoplay+autocache disabled using a browser extension) all load with HTML5, autopreloading and autoplaying.

Yeah, which brings me to the next point:
The total madness of my and their bandwidth waste. Luckily there is a browser extension that allows me to disable autoplay and autopreload, and it's almost unbelievable that such basic features are missing on Youtube. The extension only works for the Flash player though. ... It introduces a degree of sanity that cannot be expected from Youtube.
You go to a video page just to check comments or something, one of MANY reasons that do NOT involve watching the video, and Youtube is happily shoveling video data at full speed over your connection, for no reason at all.
Whenever I actually WANT to watch a video and only get 20 kB/s, it reminds me of this madness.

The Flash player isn't properly designed either, though it's manageable. It's kinda sad that you click on a point on the search bar, which is a legitimate and confirmed input action, and the player won't acknowledge it, but jump back to the end of the preload. You have to click 2-3 times until the player acknowledges what you want to do. Software is getting way too quirky. If software design continues like that, at some point we might need psychiatrists for websites.

And aside from player issues, I am being annoyed by the Youtube stalker with messages about the new One Channel design and that I should learn about its features, regardless of the fact that I am already using it and have clicked away the checklist. And I'm only using it because I'm missing some functionality in the old design. The new one though has many bugs, and I had to redesign my channel in order to avoid them, because apparently I cannot rely on Youtube to fix them.
When I add a playlist scroll section, for some playlists with more than 12 videos it doesn't show the button to browse the rest, pretending there are only 12 videos in the playlist.
When I want to set a thumbnail for a playlist, it only works with the first video in the list. If I want to use the thumbnail from video 10, I have to move that to the top, set thumbnail, save, re-edit and move it back to 10. I had to figure out this workaround by myself.

I've encountered this kind of madness a lot and in my understanding it is the corporate level psychological illness that comes with the unhealthy fear-based philosophy of such a business.

The patient needs treatment or he has to be locked away.

With ponies all around as a source of joy, pretty much the only constant, all-time annoyance in my day is various software-based issues.

Edited May 4, 2013 by Dowlphin

[Dowlphin 463]

That HTML5 player is coming up with more and more ways to mess up. I clicked start, but nothing at all happened.

I reloaded. Clicked start. Waited. Started to play.

Switched to another page, switched back after a while: Sound of the video was playing, video showed trumbnail, preload bar was full, play button showed stopped, index dot at the beginning.

 

I learned through experience that there's no point giving feedback to Youtube. Their talk is so phoney. If it was worth communicating those problems, they wouldn't cause them in the first place.

I actually did communicate some problems at first, but there was no feedback, no change. It's like talking to a wall. Youtube doesn't respect their users. It's significantly diminishing the fun of being creative when one is relying on a crappy platform for that.

 

I hope noncommercial efforts will increasingly teach a lesson here. Either big business stops its idiocy, or they will have to learn the hard way.

[Celtore 2,770]

A move to HTML5 is a smart move in general. While I admit that youtube doesn't exactly have the greatest implimentation at the moment, Flash just really needs to die already. It's a ridiculous idea that we finally have browsers that can directly render videos and we still have a dependency on a third party application to do the same task.

 

So how about all those "The Adobe Flash Plugin has crashed" warnings? If Mozilla didn't include that, the entire browser would crash every time that happened, and it did for a while. The isolation of the Flash plugin was a major feature of I believe firefox version 4.0 that improved stability quite a bit. I still feel pain on the linux side of my computer whenever I run rekonq because the browser can crash on any page on the slightest hint of Flash.

 

Flash is also completely irrelivant in the mobile space, an area that is growing much faster than desktop PCs. HTML5 is an open web standard that is the same across all platforms, no other plugins needed. That is one of the greatest strengths of the technology, since it is an open standard, everyone can view multimedia content on any capable device capable of running a web browser without the support of a third party company.

 

Also while Apple killed Flash on the IOS side, Adobe themselves killed Flash on Android. They stopped supporting a market with over 750-Million devices (number provided by Google CEO Larry Page on March 13 2013).

 

Sorry, I just needed to go off on a general rant about Flash, it really does need to go the way of activeX. I agree that Youtube's implimentation is very shoddy and I think Google should put as much effort into it as they seem to put on redesigning their layout every month.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Celtore

[Dowlphin 463]

You see, we both have good reason to choose which implementation to use.

 

A browser not crashing when a plugin messes up is a reasonable thing.

I had Flash crash and lockup trouble a long time ago with certain Flash versions and an old Opera browser (version 9 or so). Since I brought everything to current latest release (was a pain though), it's quite stable, although Opera sometimes mysteriously crashes without comment, but that seems to be connected to the amount of open tabs, too. Right now, the HTML5 player is definitely increasing the risk of browser crash for me.

 

I mean, it's ridiculous that I opt out of HTML5, and then open a video page and it says my browser cannot play any of the formats, while it can play both, and this message appears when Youtube has sneakily opted me back in. So I have to opt out again and then reload the page 1-10 times until I finally get the Flash player.

 

I believe that this is a corporate illness because I have seen it in so many other areas. Blizzard (who run World of Warcraft) are like that, too. They make unrefined, seriouly flawed crap and then force it onto people. People are asking for a sane solution to an age old problem, while Blizzard is whining about all the manpower they need to develop new stuff, but then they put HUGE manpower into the development of something they say is a solution to the problem, while in reality it makes pretty much everything worse.

I eventually decided that I couldn't take that amount of screwing and dissing anymore and left. Not really unhappy about that one, but when it comes to major creative expression, it's a pain in the ass.

With the environment of fear and the escalating of the monetary stranglehold, we can rely less and less on the corporate world to provide sound, reasonable and smooth solutions based on sincerity, insight and passion.

 

I tend to take The Cable Guy from the movie of the same name as an example of the corporate mentality. It's an amalgamation of the inner-psyche issues at work in the people who are pulling the strings in business.

 

UPDATE:

I think I have fixed/circumvented some problems now. Installed a new version of ExtendTube and added a few custom actions that modify web pages.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Dowlphin

[A Blithering Div 247]

What angers me the most about their HTML 5 player that I don't use is that apparently all of the videos I want to watch are in h.264 which Mozilla doesn't support for monetary reasons. However I can play Google's own codec known as WebM (or VP8). Google owns Youtube. So why the hell are they not using their own in house codec? If they won't spent the server time to transcode to WebM, what incentive do content creators have to use it?

[Dowlphin 463]

Is the Flash player capable of playing VP8+Ogg in a Webm container?

 

Apparently, Youtube divides strictly. Their Flash player only plays the h.264+AAC in MP4 container and their HTML5 player only plays the Webm. 

 

I'm wondering why you have trouble though. The Flash player plugin circumvents browser support for media formats. My Opera 12 doesn't support h.264 either, but the Flash player plugin makes playback possible.

 

 

Somehow my browser feels much quicker and less burdened now with the updated extension. It surprises me, because I only had one or two video windows open and on standby. Those one or two apparently were messing up Opera quite a lot.

I'm running a HTML5 video disabler action AND an opt-in prevention action. The very fact that those two actions scripts are being offered shows that other people have the same problem with Youtube's annoying behavior.

 

 

UPDATE:

I restarted Opera and got back into the trial!!! And all 4 videos I opened were HTML5 on autoplay! That sneaky evil Youtube bastard takes every millisecond opportunity. Or maybe the extension didn't work for some reason, but then it would mean that Youtube pretended it worked. Strange coincidence that would be, although not surprising.

Man, my mind is full of mushroom clouds right now!

 

 

 

EDIT:

 

Google,

Edited May 6, 2013 by Dowlphin