Rant: Why do videos need to buffer?

Question

Why can't videos act normal like cell phones and mp4 players? Why do we need to wait until it loads to watch a single video?

Answer 1

Internet isn't fast enough to load the video "on-demand".



Think of watching a video like ice-skating down a long stretch of icy road. But the road is really bumpy and jagged, so we need to "load" the road by having a Zamboni machine drive down it, to load up the road and pave it with a flat sheet of ice.



However, Zamboni machines are so slow that if you don't give it a massive head-start (i.e. let it buffer), you're going to catch up to it soon enough, and then you'll have to stop and wait for it (and that would suck).

Answer 2

A video has to buffer because the file you are trying to play is on another computer and must be downloaded to your device via the internet before it can be played. If you had a 20 Megabyte video that was 10 seconds long, that video would average 2 Megabytes per second (MB/s). Because most people's internet connection is not that fast, you would watch the video faster than you could download it, and it would start and stop hundreds of times. Buffering allows you to download a large portion of the video so it can be played continuously. This gives your computer or device some time to start downloading the rest of the video while you are watching the first large part of it, so when you reach the end of the pre-downloaded section, the rest is there waiting to be played. It may seem annoying to have to wait for the video to buffer, but without buffering the video would not play smoothly. Instead of watching one video, you would end up watching that video cut up into a few hundred .1 second long pieces: not pleasant. Some people have fast connections to the internet that would allow them to download the video in a second or two, but those people still have to buffer. This is because the server sending the video is limited to a certain speed, so you still have to wait on the other end of the line for the video to load. This too seems like pointless waiting, but it has a purpose also. The limit is put in place so that everyone has a fair chance to use the server. If multiple people ask the server for the same video at the same time, the server would have to pick one person to send the video to while the rest wait. With the speed limit in place, everyone can take a portion of the server's ability and download the video a little bit slower, but simultaneously. Both buffering and download speed limits are small sacrifices made that improve the end result much more than their value.



Hope this helped you understand :)

Answer 3

Assuming you're talking about videos from streaming sites such as Youtube. The answer is simple: The videos are not fully onto your computer yet. The video downloads (streams) as you're watching it, so if the video plays faster than it is streaming, then it has to stop playing in order to get ahead again. The video cannot play without being on your computer, which is why cellphones and mp4 players do not have this problem. Mp4 players and cellphones have the videos you're trying to watch already on them. Your computer does not have every video on the internet and Youtube already on it, therefore you have to get the video onto your computer to watch it, which is streaming.



Your computer cannot play videos it doesn't have, so downloading the video while you watch it enables your computer to get the video and play it at the same time. If there was no streaming, you would have to download the full video every time you want to watch one, but with the magic of streaming, you can simply wait a few seconds for the video to stream while paused (buffering) and then watch it while it downloads.



If you're having trouble with videos pausing every five seconds, just simply pause it and wait for a while, and by manually buffering it, it should play smoothly for the rest of the video depending on how long you paused it.

Answer 4

Videos are embedded onto web pages, and thus, must be called up. When you call it, the video is displayed for the user, but cannot all load at once. Loading the video caches it in your browser. Once cached, the video will load much faster. Buffering more or less "checks the video file" before playing it. When a video is launched from the computer's hard drive, the contents have already been verified, and thus, the video(s) play(s). Believe it or not, videos on your hard drive buffer as well, but do not require an Internet connection, and buffer at lightning fast speeds (99.9999% of the time, it's unnoticeable).

Answer 5

High quality video streaming is a lot more information to download than a song. "Buffering" is just another term for waiting a video to download. There's a 'buffer' between the part of the video you are watching and the amount of video that has been downloaded. If you catch up to the end of the buffer, that means that the rate at which the video is downloading is slower than the rate at which you are a watching the video.

Answer 6

You do not need to wait until it all loads. You only need to get enough of a buffer (say, 30 seconds) so that any interruptions in streaming the file will not cause the video to start jerking.

Answer 7

Dodge has the answer. And the reason it happens is that the path you get to the server is too slow. (The internet is designed to eventually get the data from point A to point B. It's not designed to get it there quickly.) The ONLY thing you can do is start the video, pause it and wait until it finishes downloading. Then watch it. (No one controls the path you get - that's decided by the routers on the internet.)