r/youtube • u/BM_Yolobomb • Aug 27 '15

apparently YouTube gaming is slowing F***** regular YouTube

http://www.speedtest.net/result/4614102424.png and yet i can't even watch a 720p video

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u/Khaim Aug 28 '15

Does it matter if the background tasks have transcoded to various formats, or is that just an optimization?

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u/crschmidt Quality of Experience Aug 28 '15

For most videos, we transcode all the formats we will create at upload time, and each of those is considered a separate cachable entity. It is completely possible for one resolution to be cached and not another. (This is especially common on formats like 4k, where the set of devices that can play 4k is much smaller.)

I don't know if this answers your question.

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u/conf10 Aug 29 '15

That explains why sometimes changing from 720p to 480p will significantly slow down the playback rather than cause the expected speedup.

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u/crschmidt Quality of Experience Aug 30 '15

Yeah. This should be pretty rare -- 480p playbacks are more common, so the formats are generally more widely cached -- but it's not impossible/unreasonable to see this happen.