Youtube plugin idea (and question)

[rcfant89]

So like most people, youtube is especially slow on my home connection and I seem to have a much worse experience specifically due to buffering. I will be watching a video and even it the entire video has been streamed to me already, if I replay it or rewind it, youtube will delete all my buffered progress which seems absolutely ridiculous to me, a waste of internet bandwidth (since you have to restream it) and more strain on their servers.

Is it possible to write a code (like a google chrome plugin) that will store your buffer in ram? I have 16GB of ram on my PC and I could store so much in there instead of having to restream it. I have already gotten the content and there is absolutely no reason, in my mind, why it serves anyone's best interest for me to have to restream it.

How would I go about doing this?

 

[getochkn]

Just use a downloader, download it, watch it, delete it.

 

[rcfant89]

Yeah except if we are going to be realistic, no one is going to want to download every video they watch and that would be too much of a hassle to find the downloaded file then go delete it every time. It'd be way easier for the user with the method I'm describing and I'd like to do that. And I would like to know how to do it, not for alternate suggestions but I appreciate your comment.

 

[getochkn]

It was a simple solution to a complicated problem that you don't know how to solve. If you know coding, you could probably find an open source downloader and change it to download the stream and save it in memory, to be played back but I think it would have to be done outside of youtube as you can't directly change the standard youtube player to alter it get it's stream from your pc memory instead of youtube, in which case you would need a different player or a local webserver that you would have to type in the address of the video you want to watch, let it fill the buffer, than start playing it. To be on youtube.com though, select a video, start your plugin, have it capture the stream and change the youtube player to get the stream for your RAM instead, I don't see being possible as youtube doesn't let you alter youtube code on the fly.

If you don't know coding, then you can start to learn.

 

[USAFRet]

In addition to the above, you are an outlier with 16gb RAM. I do as well, but primarily because I routinely run a few VM's.

I suspect the national average is below 3gb.

 

[rcfant89]

In addition to the above, you are an outlier with 16gb RAM. I do as well, but primarily because I routinely run a few VM's.

I suspect the national average is below 3gb.

Most people don't have 16GB, sure, but I would argue that most people have more than plenty to hold the youtube videos they watch (or at least the most recent 1, 2 or 3). I'd guess most people have at least 4GB with the average being closer to 6 or 8 and anyone with a PC can upgrade to 8GB with great ease. A 5 minute youtube tutorial and a bit of research on what type of ram your mobo runs would suffice.

 

[getochkn]

In addition to the above, you are an outlier with 16gb RAM. I do as well, but primarily because I routinely run a few VM's.

I suspect the national average is below 3gb.

Ya, I forgot to mention that. Just because the OP has 16GB, it doesn't mean many do. a 720p youtube video of 1hr of length in mp4 is almost 1GB in size. 1080p is going to be even more.

 

[USAFRet]

In addition to the above, you are an outlier with 16gb RAM. I do as well, but primarily because I routinely run a few VM's.

I suspect the national average is below 3gb.

Most people don't have 16GB, sure, but I would argue that most people have more than plenty to hold the youtube videos they watch (or at least the most recent 1, 2 or 3). I'd guess most people have at least 4GB with the average being closer to 6 or 8 and anyone with a PC can upgrade to 8GB with great ease. A 5 minute youtube tutorial and a bit of research on what type of ram your mobo runs would suffice.

I think you overestimate what people actually have and use.
Of the 6 PC's I have here right now (3 laptops, HTPC, wife's desktop, my main box), only one of them is above 4gb. The 16 in my main machine brings that average to 5GB. If I had only gotten 8gb in this box, my household average would be just over 3gb.

People might have 4 or 8, only if they've bought or built in the last 18 months or so. There are a LOT of older machines out there.

 

[rcfant89]

Of course, that is true, but the average video is 4 minutes 12 seconds and if you don't have enough ram to hold at least that full length then your system is sub par. And it's a moot point anyway, I am not interested in how much ram some people have in their computers. My question is how does one go about making something like this, a plugin? Where does a beginner (me) start with this task? Thanks for the replies.

 

[USAFRet]

Of course, that is true, but the average video is 4 minutes 12 seconds and if you don't have enough ram to hold at least that full length then your system is sub par. And it's a moot point anyway, I am not interested in how much ram some people have in their computers. My question is how does one go about making something like this, a plugin? Where does a beginner (me) start with this task? Thanks for the replies.

Learn JavaScript and XML.

 

[rcfant89]

Anyone else have thoughts, comments, advice regarding this topic?

 

[getochkn]

Anyone else have thoughts, comments, advice regarding this topic?

Learn JavaScript and XML.

That's about it, learn programming. If you don't know programming, I don't know what other advice we could give you.

 

[rcfant89]

I don't know what other advice we could give you.

Thanks for your advice, it has been noted. Now I would like to hear from others for additional opinions on this matter.