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Back in the day you used to be able to buffer the entire video too. So if I had a bad connection, I’d open a dozen youtube links, walk away for 5 mins, then come back and watch whatever with zero hiccup. No longer possible now that content only buffers a portion of the way, not just on youtube either. If you are on a spotty connection its therefore better to just pull the video with youtube-dl.


But what if you don’t watch the video? That bandwidth is wasted.

Someone at Google did the math and figured they can save some single-digit percentage of their annual bandwidth spend.

At their scale thats $millions and that guy got promoted for frustrating every person out there like yourself.


Maybe I will pull the video a dozen times before actually watching it now just out of spite, since my bandwidth is unmetered and theirs isn’t.




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