jwt27 wrote:

Well that's a great idea... If it actually worked!! On my (slow) connection it either keeps spinning, playing the low-quality stream until the end of the video, or it just stops playing halfway through.

Yeah... Some of the older videos prior to this change didn't respond well to this "feature", even on decent connections, and while the theory is to keep the video going no matter what until a higher quality stream is ready, people who don't have the bandwidth to handle both at the same time get screwed by it.

YouTube also used to buffer videos entirely, but that changed at some point too.

elianda wrote:

Well, I use for all of my videos the same workflow that results in x264 encoded H.264 material with AAC audio in an mkv container. Still the result on youtube varies.

Exactly. That's the same encoding my MP4 files have, and the quality after uploading to YouTube was lousy.

Try re-encoding to Xvid AVIs with MP3 audio compression and see if that helps. ;)

elianda wrote:

I do not use any ad revenue function of google and/or youtube.

Either way, I was just mentioning the effects Content-ID can have on monetization. Content-ID matches and copyright strikes can occur all the same, monetized or not.

elianda wrote:

I don't think that is correct. I already had at least three videos where I got copyright notices directly after it was processed by youtube.

I'll say it again: Content-ID Matches and Copyright Strikes are NOT the same thing!

When you dispute a Content-ID claim, you're basically telling YouTube to "make my video work the way it's supposed to until the Content-ID match holder says otherwise". The dispute claim is sent to the person who uploaded the Content-ID material who then must decide if your dispute is valid or not. Some Content-ID holders will make an effort to adequately handle this situation, but some will just be dicks and say your dispute is invalid, even when it's blatantly obvious it IS valid. Under those circumstances, when you're 100% certain you're in the clear, you file a more official dispute that basically challenges the Content-ID match holder to take you to court if they're so certain the match is valid.

Copyright Strikes, again, MUST be initiated by someone manually. They DO NOT happen automatically and trust me, you will know the difference between the two if it ever happens.

I though that YouTube was already social and slow, and it could not get any worse. But the Web 3.0 is right here and has proved me wrong. While slow, the old comments system felt just good enough. Being somewhat incompetent, and ignorant of existing traditions on the web, I don't feel Google can build a more complex system.

Why are these sites trying to become our only window to the internet by attempting to implement and force usage of every form of online communication? PhotoBucket upgraded from a file host to add friends and other social crap. FileDen went completely nuts with their CX system, spamming my inbox weekly with offers unrelated to basic Web hosting that they were there for. (I am using neither of these anymore.) I brushed against a few more such wannabe social file hosts.

The social face of the web is completely foreign to me. I occasionally don't understand the terminology even. Where we had an avatar, there is now photo. Is the photo I am seeing really my avatar? Or do I upload another picture to get it to display next to my posts? Why is not a user able to have a username, as it was for years before Google was created and became socially arrogant? The user name change, where YouTube repeatedly remind me that the G-Plus name can be used, was utterly confusing too. I typed a comment onto a video, then this 2-choice box pops up obstructing the screen. I press Back in my browser to get away from the dialog page, and try to make my post again. I end up losing all the text that I typed because Opera failed to save my input due to YouTube's form being too complex.

The change of design around selecting the resolution was strange. There was plenty of space on the status bar to fit all the important commands. They may have decided that the "social user" will not be able to distingush more than 2 buttons.

It appears to be impossible to vote in comments inherited fromt he old system, nor reply to them. Essentially those "threads" just got "locked" in mass.

There is one advantage that a good poster can take advantage of. New comments can be very long. However, as you can see from my writing, this is not always a good thing. The old system forced the user to reword their statements to be short and concrete in order to fit.

I have had a blank Google+ page for a while. I have not intentionally posted anything onto it. Today I visit it to see what was there. And it was filled with mainstream stuff that I have hardly heard of to "get me started": no Yamaha, no OPL3, no gaming, no cats (especially no cats), to keep some relevancy. They are just pushing what is already "popular" on a feedback loop to limit our vision.

/rant mode turned down.

The existance of YouTube is a bit of a "paradox". The site wastes a lot of network bandwidth (by not allowing to configure buffering and starting playback when one only wants to interact with text around the video), and requiring a fast CPU to run the javascript and unnecessarily upscaled video. But all people, including enthusiasts of old hardware, flock there. I wish a "enthusiast" version would be created, or at least that people stopped referring to YouTube, when they want to share only music. Posting a hyperlink to a sound file is often enough.

One thing that can be said though is that the social aspect of any website can be powerful.

But in terms of a company as big as Google, the only way they'll take notice of stupid changes and policies is if people stop using their services. So long as people are using their services, they don't care what they do, so long as they make lots of money in the process.

Case in Point: You can browse through the forums on YouTube and find messages from thousands upon thousands of people running into problems they can't solve... and yet a lot of them STILL use YouTube anyways, rather than simply avoiding it.

So many people post so many videos on there that Google doesn't HAVE to care. The number of people with the resolve to completely stop using such a powerful service because of stupid changes is tiny compared to how much money that service aims to rake in with their changes.

And then the irony of the entire situation comes down to having to consider other people too... Some of the people I watch on YouTube make their livelihood from YouTube videos. By not watching their videos on YouTube in protest of the YouTube system getting stupider and stupider, I'm not supporting them either, whom I DO wish to support. >_>;

*shrugs* The best I can do is limit how much attention I give Google in the hopes other people will follow suit because it's the ONLY way to get a company as large as it is to change their ways.

It's all quite simple, social media is supposed to be big IT, Google's social attempt Google+ is not doing so well. So they need to push more people into it. And abusing the comment system for that seems obvious. When people feel the need to have to comment on videos then they are the perfect match 😉
Getting angry at Google is also quite futile, it will only damage yourself, not hurt Google.
And yes, I mislike the direction of Google lately (the last three years or so)

I never had any issues with YT. None of my videos had copyright problems.

What annoys me most is how every Joe needs to monetize their videos. Makes browsing videos a real pain.

For me it works well. I like to document guides and useful information and help others build their systems. When someone types MT-32 in google my 3h tutorial pops up on the first page 😀

Dominus wrote:

Getting angry at Google is also quite futile, it will only damage yourself, not hurt Google.

That's the point I was trying to make: "Actions speak louder than words."

If you're upset with the way a company is doing something, then simply don't use their services. Consumers wield a lot more power than they realize and, just like voting, when enough people follow suit the impact they can have can really be felt, even by a large company.

Getting angry at a company for doing stupid things is easy and pointless. Taking action by not giving a company your business, that's the way to get them to change (or go bankrupt if they refuse to). ;)

Yeah I know, one person alone is not going to affect a juggernaut like Google, but imagine what would happen if even just 1% of the entirety of YouTube stopped using Google altogether as a result of something like this. That's likely hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of dollars of lost revenue. Google would NOTICE that, I guarantee it. :P

The only reason why I continue to use YouTube is simply because there is no better alternative. They essentially hold a monopoly on the whole video sharing market.

It's just seems like time and time again... site after site is ruined adding new "features"

Sort of related to that... I used to collect photos off Picasa. Then they incorporated it into google+, and now you can no longer do any sort of simple search.... they turned it into another social networking site

Gemini000 wrote:

Consumers wield a lot more power than they realize and, just like voting, when enough people follow suit the impact they can have can really be felt, even by a large company.

That is very true. I was thinking about the copyright issues. Essentially, these consumers have freely handed over the power to police what they are allowed to do. I see complaints about takedowns all the time, but few links to download or stream the relevant copyrighted content that would bypass YouTube.

I predict that Google will not change. The current system is not that much worse than the previous one. And people have too short memory to compare it against a fast forum of a decade ago.

The link to see the previous post in a comment thread "in reply to" now opens an entire new page in my browser, where the same video starts to download immediately (instead of only the previous comment).

Around the same time as the new comments system was rolled out, YouTube also began to force the use of the HTML5 player with video size capped at 640*360 in YV12. This only happens with still frame pseudo-videos, or close to that, in Opera/Chromium(Opium), but not Firefox or Opera, which continue use normal Flash plugin where full color resolution can be obtained. There seems to be no obvious way to request/pick Flash.

Their new comment system is completely broken for me.

All it gives me is a blinking cursor and no matter how badly I smash and thrash my keyboard nothing can ever input into it. If I even RIGHT CLICK the text box it acts as if I right clicked the whole page.

What moron programmed this BS? Seriously how can you break something as EASY as a text input area... I've made one for my boyfriend's website without even touching flash or javascript or silverlight or any clientside scripting stupidity... What makes Google so special that they completely break it like this?

Oh and apparently that comment box crashes some peoples browsers silently, well done Google. Hire some actual competent HTML developers... good god.

The Google "product forums" are a massive flamewar against Google and as a result there's no answers to be had from there. Disturbingly enough someone reported that spoofing your user agent to masquerade as Google Chrome fixes *alot* of site issues with YouTube but I have not confirmed this for myself yet. Though if I masquerade myself as Chrome and this fixes the commenting issue among other things, then people might as well start using another video sharing site like Dailymotion or start using Twitch.TV (of course that's for streaming) from now on.

DracoNihil wrote:

Disturbingly enough someone reported that spoofing your user agent to masquerade as Google Chrome fixes *alot* of site issues with YouTube but I have not confirmed this for myself yet.

This would not surprise me in the slightest. Web developers still often have to code their sites to work slightly differently on different browsers to get around certain issues, but the trouble is that when new versions of those browsers come out, the devs often forget to test if their site will now work WITHOUT the workaround, instead opting to keep the workaround in under the assumption that they'll always need it.

This often breaks things instead. >_>;

@ j7n
Web 2.0 sucked enough with its bloat but 3.0 just might be the last straw, sick an tired of how everything must be integrated with google, yahoo, and facebook.

Gemini000 wrote:

Web developers still often have to code their sites to work slightly differently on different browsers to get around certain issues, but the trouble is that when new versions of those browsers come out, the devs often forget to test if their site will now work WITHOUT the workaround, instead opting to keep the workaround in under the assumption that they'll always need it.

From experience I can tell you that these days, most elusive compatibility issues like that are the result of bad coding - applying needlessly heavy and complex client-side scripts to accomplish ridiculously simple tasks, thereby introducing any number of things that can go wrong for no apparent reason. That, and silly browser-specific implementations of HTML5 before it's even been standardized properly. Web developers could work around >90% of these issues by keeping things simple, but simple and lean code just isn't hip anymore, so they'd rather effectively drag us all back to the days of "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4.0!".

Not to mention the performance issues; Intel C2D CPUs are hardly cutting-edge, but FFS - there's no excuse, even in 2013, for making a dual-core CPU stutter and choke on the trivial task of displaying a bunch of text and images.

---------
As for Youtube and Google's shenanigans, I'm undecided... short of abandoning their services completely, I guess I could transfer some of my stuff onto a fictitious account or two, in order to at least avoid this Google+ crap some of the time (on my "real name" accounts). Has anyone had any success transferring youtube channels between accounts?

I am so fed up with Google that I even use DuckDuckGo as my search provider and only resort to using Google when I really have to.
Its not ideal since Googles search engine is superior to everyting else but I will not continue feeding them with information.
"Do no harm" has evolved to "Do nose around"

YouTube did make an attempt to make things simple a while ago with Feather, an alternate interface to the service, which made use of "advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded". Feather worked well on slow JavaScript implementations, like Opera 8, and could be used to listen to soundtracks with limited multitasking, without the sound stuttering.

Unfortunately, the project appears to be abandoned, and is lacking in functionality. It seems comments are no longer shown in it all. I think they were read-only before. What so not hip about it? The flat theme even looks Metro-ish.

As an alternate to Google's nosing, I'm using StartPage, which is a kind of front-end to Google. The biggest advantage of it is that it returns direct links for search results. However, when searching for rare terms, significantly fewer results are shown than by Google itself. New posts also don't appear as quickly on StartPage.

Skyscraper wrote:

I am so fed up with Google that I even use DuckDuckGo as my search provider and only resort to using Google when I really have to.
Its not ideal since Googles search engine is superior to everyting else but I will not continue feeding them with information.
"Do no harm" has evolved to "Do nose around"

I've been using Blekko since I started this thread and so far it's filled the role of search engine pretty well, with both pros and cons compared to Google. It also has its own image search system that doesn't rely on other search providers, something DuckDuckGo doesn't have.

Also, ignore the amber user rating Avast gives you if you have that installed as your virus scanner. I STILL haven't been able to figure out why it's been down-rated so much other than the conspiracy theory that competing search engine companies are forcing the rating down with their own downvotes. :P

Skyscraper wrote:

I am so fed up with Google that I even use DuckDuckGo as my search provider and only resort to using Google when I really have to.

I tried DDG for a while recently, but unfortunately it uses that infuriating "load more results as you scroll down" system, with no pagination, so it's a no-go for me.

j7n wrote:

As an alternate to Google's nosing, I'm using StartPage, which is a kind of front-end to Google. The biggest advantage of it is that it returns direct links for search results. However, when searching for rare terms, significantly fewer results are shown than by Google itself. New posts also don't appear as quickly on StartPage.

...this, however, seems a whole lot better - thanks! Not sure why it'd return fewer results than Google if it simply forwards queries to Google, as it says, but it's a whole lot lighter and snappier as a whole and the interface looks perfect - gonna be trying it for a while.

j7n wrote:

As an alternate to Google's nosing, I'm using StartPage, which is a kind of front-end to Google. The biggest advantage of it is that it returns direct links for search results. However, when searching for rare terms, significantly fewer results are shown than by Google itself. New posts also don't appear as quickly on StartPage.

Thanks!
This worked much better than DuckDuckGo

The new changes are awful and forceful. Google is starting to think they can dictate whatever they want, and that really sucks. It's even worse for content providers who are monitized, they have to be really careful when dealing with comments not to refresh the page and stuff otherwise they get flagged for trying to exploit the ad system. The first couple of days you couldn't even leave comments if you used firefox/palemoon, the comment box wouldn't accept any input. Thankfully I used an alias when I created my gmail and youtube, and I don't have it linked to my phone...

VileRancour wrote:

Not sure why it'd return fewer results than Google if it simply forwards queries to Google

Here I am searching for rare terms. And here I am searching for a post that I know is new and it does not appear anywhere in the results of StartPage. Previously I have experienced this with my own posts.

A few ad-filters for various "security seal" pictures can make StartPage even snappier. I am using it mainly from the search bar of my browser, and switching to Google when there is a need. Blekko is bundled there as well, but I have no opinion on it yet.

With good old Opera, I have not yet experienced instability when commenting on YouTube.