[Tabular-Iceberg]

I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

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.

[ConceptJunkie]

Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.

MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.

[MangoToupe]

> 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.

How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.

[morshu9001]

That's if you weren't using a Mac

[amomchilov]

You just reminded me of Perian. What a throwback!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian

[j45]

Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon.

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.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.

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.

[throwaway94275]

1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it.

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.

[keyringlight]

The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.

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.

[fragmede]

"Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage to achieve.

[j45]

Depending on where personal/portable AI devices go, phones might be significantly different or not exist in 10 years as they do today.

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.

[pxc]

> 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.

When it's not impeded by DRM, that is

[littlestymaar]

long press -> save image/video is perfectly supported on a phone, it's just content diffusion platform that arbitrarily restrict it.

[armchairhacker]

A specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser: the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth.

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.

[gloosx]

The real problem is that YouTube built a model where the platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse for such centralisation.

[guardian5x]

Back then, the focus was on optimising for the user. Now, however, companies prioritise their own interests over the user.

[gjm11]

I think companies always prioritized their own interests.

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.

[turtletontine]

We even have a name for this now…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1

[vladms]

Indeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering what I ended up using couple of years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)

/s

[reaperducer]

I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.

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.

[crtasm]

You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.

[thijson]

I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.

[Telaneo]

DRM being forced into freeview TV seems like a contradiction in terms, and yet here we are.

[Marsymars]

Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.

[duped]

A media business is predicated on exclusive rights over their media. The entire notion of media being freely copied and saved is contrary to their business models. I think there's a healthy debate to be had over whether those models are entitled to exist and how much harm to consumers is tolerable, but it's not really obvious how to create a business that deals in media without some kind of protection over the copying and distribution of that media.

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.

[GuB-42]

Experience with video is excellent for most people. All the complexity is hidden from the end user, unless you are trying to hack something. In the 1990s, streaming effectively didn't exist because people didn't have enough bandwidth (it was mostly dial-up), and there was very little legal offering, and the little that existed was terrible. Home video was limited too, as few people knew how to make video files suitable for online diffusion.

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.

[a96]

It took quite far into the 90's before things like truecolour displays and hardware accelerated video scaling appeared as well. Computers would struggle to view anything bigger than a postage stamp. Hard drive space was also really expensive. It started to change fast towards the end of the decade, though.

[dev0p]

YouTube should have been a distributed p2p system with local storage of your favorite videos. A man can dream...

[amelius]

Didn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an early advantage).

[psychoslave]

Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.

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.

[kawsper]

It’s not just you. My Firefox, with no extensions, have struggled on YouTube the past weeks.

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.

[skirmish]

Well, the corporate policy in GOOG now is to only test everything on Chrome. Engineers are not even allowed to install Firefox. This is the result.

[irthomasthomas]

I've got a fresh install of endeavouros/arch and yt is horribly slow now. The upside is I've reduced my usage of the site.

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.

[usrbinbash]

> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays

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.

[ryandrake]

I've always found it insane how much software development web sites are willing to undertake, just to avoid using the standard video, audio, and img HTML elements. It's almost hilarious how over engineered everything is, just so they can 'protect' things they are ultimately publishing on the open web.

[jsheard]

Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.

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).

[demetris]

The standard video element is really nice:

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). :-)

[Aurornis]

> 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.

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?

[nurettin]

Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.

[noirscape]

The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.

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.

[physicsguy]

Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!

[reaperducer]

Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!

I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.

[deltoidmaximus]

Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.

[weberer]

I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.

[morshu9001]

Around 2012?, I had some extension that forced YouTube videos to play with Quicktime in-browser, which was leaner. Original file, no conversion.