[aldarisbm]

I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me.

Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Regardless, I could not stop thinking how having physical media would avoid these drops.

[Dalewyn]

>I absolutely need a wired connection

You do.

[criddell]

Unless you have a Sony Smart TV. I bought one a few years ago and the ethernet port is a 100 Mb. To stream from Sony's own movie service, they tell you to use WiFi:

> https://electronics.sony.com/bravia-core

> 7: The Pure Stream™ feature requires an Internet speed of at least 43 Mbps. To enjoy at the highest speed of 80 Mbps, you need an Internet speed of 115 Mbps or faster. Ethernet (wired LAN) connections are limited to 100 Mbps due to the TV's product specifications. Therefore, to enjoy 80 Mbps with Pure Stream™ functionality, you need to connect to a Wi-Fi router that supports IEEE 802.11 ac/n (wireless LAN).

[NovemberWhiskey]

Depending on who you ask, requirements per 4K UHD stream are about 25-30Mb/s. This is not a number that any kind of modern wifi should have difficulty keeping up with. I have absolutely no problems with 4K UHD streaming over wifi; mixture of Wifi 6 and 6E throughout. In fact, Wifi 6E is usually faster than wired GigE.

[everforward]

Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches.

I find it roughly equal as things go.

The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer.

That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while.

The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.

[Macha]

I remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length).

But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive.

Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time.

Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.

[actionfromafar]

Also, if it's a TV, they typically don't have disks, or at least not disks large enough, fast enough, and write wear tolerant enough, to cache data.