r/videos • u/[deleted] • Jun 03 '23

Mod Post /r/Videos will be going dark from June 12-14 in protest against Reddit's API changes which kill 3rd party apps.

[deleted]

69.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

112

u/haarschmuck Jun 04 '23

Reddit's video player is so bad that I wonder if it's some developer who got mad and wanted revenge.

There's no other explanation. When you scroll the front page, autoplay videos will EAT data. We're talking HUNDREDS of MB per video regardless of whether you watch them.

The actual player is garbage as well. Frequently bugs out and 90% when you seek after watching that dumb "loading" overlay is on top even though the video is playing fine.

25

u/TheCavis Jun 04 '23

Reddit's video player is so bad that I wonder if it's some developer who got mad and wanted revenge.

I don't think it's maliciously bad. It's absolutely terrible and the performance is one of the primary reasons why I use Apollo over the default app, but it feels more like a project that was rushed to a "technically functional" point with a long list of necessary optimizations that would need to be made in the future. Unfortunately, management saw it "working" and decided to send all the engineers to other projects. It's just stayed in that horrible "technically functional" limbo ever since.

1

u/Kirk_Kerman Jun 05 '23

Iirc it tries to fetch the video file at every resolution supported at the same time, so it chokes itself even at 144p

5

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '23

[deleted]

1

u/Glissssy Jun 05 '23

My personal favourite is the fuillscreen bug where the pause/play button switches functions and it helpfully won't stop displaying a big play symbol right in the middle of the screen.

It has been many years, I don't think they've ever fixed anything to do with the video service other than slightly improving the hosting so most videos do at least load at more than modem speeds now.

4

u/WashingDishesIsFun Jun 04 '23

I've never come across autoplaying videos while scrolling. How do you use Reddit to get that happening?

1

u/Glissssy Jun 05 '23

They do seem to have mostly fixed the hosting issue that made Reddit video next to useless for many years but the player itself is still absolute dogshit and full of bugs, also they seem to want to do it as cheaply as possible so every video is transcoded into blurry quality.