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Found this dusty antique from the days when video players would let you buffer. If only this were still a thing.
(startrek.website)
Why did this change? Was it a greed thing?
It would buffer to a temp folder. Storing it all in RAM would be pointless.
Some people's internet and hard drives would be crippled by this. It's to promote multitasking mostly. There are ways to download videos that I won't get into, but it is possible if you desperately want to buffer the whole video. I do think it's stupid to lock offline video downlaods behind a subscription paywall, but I am small fry and will do what I can.
Not at all. If your hard drive would get crippled by a few GBs then I don't know what to tell you. When the playback is stopped, and the application closed, then the temporary files are discarded.
The argument about bandwidth usage is accurate though. I didn't make sense to buffer the whole video when it might not be watched anyways.
I have replaced so many hard drives with solid state drives when the complaint is slow computer. the latency is noticeably slowing down windows and chrome, but the drive is still in good shape. So yeah, there is reason to believe that many people out there buy cheap stuff only for them to need to upgrade for more money in the near future or they live with the slow unfit for the task hardware.
Yeah, it is bad practice to use up bandwitdh with unneeded downloads when the user is there for short periods or watches small parts or one time. There are plenty of users on pay as you go plans or their infrastructure is slow and limited capacity that we call metered lines. These metered lines can be a last resort reduncy line for network stability. I have seen clients add a wireless line that is cheap to keep active, but they pay for the amount of data used.
I think the end of buffering the whole large content stream is a good thing. I believe you can add an extension to Firefox that allows for video content to be fully buffered if you want to.
The real problem here is Windows. I've seen Windows thrash spinning rust disks continuously for hours and hours until I shut it off. I put Linux on there to see what happens and it's happy as an otter with a clam.
I can't stop these people from making terrible choices. Corporations want to reach everyone as possible but for profit, so I promise its mostly the ads that take a hefty toll on their machines.