It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
Sometimes I can’t even click on the front page, sometimes when I open a video it refuses to play.
I don’t know what’s up, but it works in chrome.
/s
Otherwise, I don’t think I get your point - maybe you could clarify?
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends.
By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?
I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.
> Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability.
And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities. Don't put words in my mouth, not all of them, obviously. I'm just pointing out that a desktop with a 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket, and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some people value.
I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
That does mean we go, essentially:
Step 1: We barely have video at all.
Step 2: Everything is terrible.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I have used it on a couple of client sites, and it works really well.
You can even add a thumbnail that shows before the video starts downloading/playing (the poster attribute). :-)
Oh and it's not working at all on my desktop with the same setup, it's telling me to disable ad block. I'd rather give up yt.
There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.
And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.
Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.
The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).
Flash, also almost came built into every browser.
By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine.
Today, most browsers have most codecs.
What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.
And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.
It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.
Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
There are also various handheld PCs.
But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos, even though cut, copy, and paste are basic OS-level features. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents. These text documents easily allow cut, copy, and paste.
I'm not sure what the rollout status actually is at the moment.
Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.
Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported it for some time by way of delegating to android's native media support which included HLS.
Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
So this should eventually help things.
And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.
And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
Some of the people who produce videos for a living require vastly different tools than someone who needs to trim the edges of a short home video clip, so the the UI and UX has to be different, otherwise these people won't be able to effectively do their job.
For writing, everyone pretty much does it the same way. You sit down, you enter characters with a keyboard, and sometimes to remove/edit stuff. Of course, there are professional tools for people who write stories for a living, that helps you keep track of arcs, characters, environments and so on, and many professionals do use them.
So while it looks like "Ah, Word actually works for everyone, why can't we do the same for video?" there are still professionals who need tools specifically for "writing stories" or "writing screenplays", and same in other areas :)
Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.
> Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on."
This is such a deep misunderstanding of QuickTime that it's hard to know where to begin. QuickTime supported standards whenever possible, but you must know that QuickTime pioneered digital video and audio before open media standards were ubiquitous, and was in fact the blueprint (sometimes literally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format) for today's standards. As a top-level history lesson, do yourself a favor and ask your favorite LLM, "What technology standards did QuickTime use and inspire?"
That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.
> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…
Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
There might be a resurgence of some kind of device like a PC.
Seeing iPadOS gain desktop features, and MacOS starting to adopt more and more iPadOS type features clearly shows the desktop, laptop and tablet experiences will be merged at some point by Apple at least.
There's a reason that once alternatives became available, users left QT as quickly as they could.
QT was pioneering A/V solutions; I won't argue against that. So was Flash, so was Shockwave, so was RealMedia, and remember the horror that was Windows Media Player (from the Win98 era)?
A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their products and services, so that they'll get more customers or customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how much of their revenue is profit by (e.g.) cutting corners on quality or raising prices or selling customers' personal information to third parties.
Either of those can work. Yes, a noble idealistic company might choose #1 over #2 out of virtue, but I think that if most companies picked #1 in the past it's because they thought they'd get richer that way.
I think what's happened is that for some reason #2 has become easier or more profitable, relative to #1, over time. Or maybe it used not to be so clearly understood that #2 was a live option, and #1 seemed safer, but now everyone knows that you can get away with #2 so they do that.
Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they represent information that society has granted individuals or businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to regulate the rights over that information.
I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and they have a very different view of intellectual property than the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys, because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa mural or something.
I think Word and other text documents are the exception not the rule. Image files have been pretty much always been viewed in different programs than the ones used for editing (although some viewers have rudimentary crop or rotate capabilities). Same with PDFs or PS files we alway view in something different than the editor. Nobody listen to audio files in e.g. Audacity.
In fact I can't even think about any other format except for docs where the editor is also the prime viewer (I suspect the reason is that originally consumption of docs was printing)
Piracy did pretty well, but that's because the legal experience was so terrible. But even then, you had to download obscure players and codec packs, and sourcing wasn't as easy as it is now. For reference VLC and BitTorrent released in 2001.
I'd say the user experience steadily improved and peaked in the mid-2010s. I think it is worse now, but if it is worse now, back then, it was terrible, for different reasons.
I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
Wasn't dialup largely asymmetric too? I don't think p2p streaming was even on the radar back then.
Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying as being screamed at to buy a minivan.
The general public doesn't know how to program. They don't know what variables are, that they have types, they think functions are what rich people call a dinner party or corporate event. On computers, where there are no such restrictions, the majority of the public haven't suddenly become hobbyist programmers in their spare time.
If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all, not even a little bit, simply on principle, I mean, you do you. Meanwhile, there are people who aren't the majority of the public, but that want to do things that able to get into tech learning to code despite the epic of Apple vs Google vs Gilgamesh flattening towns. It would be great if it were easier because the phones were more open, but at some point you gotta go with the serenity prayer.
gets me
https://imgur.com/a/bseFwX3 on iOS 18, and https://imgur.com/a/Ksbz3zW on iOS 26
Maybe you're holding it wrong?
If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim, then they should be obligated to make their services work perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming and manipulating people.
One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube frontend.
> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all
It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.
A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on a VPS.
