I recently discovered this firefox\chrome extension that make streaming videos soo much faster. It also has built in subtitle support that lets you upload subtitles or search through opensubtitles. It’s incredible how much faster videos load https://github.com/Andrews54757/FastStream
Automatic fragmentation and parallel requests for up to 6x faster download speeds. Watch videos without interruptions by predownloading the video in the background.
Looks like it mostly just buffers the video more aggressively. If you have a good Internet connection it won’t do anything useful other than peg the server’s connection downloading the entire video file at gigabit speeds and make it worse for other viewers.
I would worry about getting rate-limited then, I’ve seen some content servers just be very picky about making too many requests (through jumping in the video too far too often).
“You’re trying to be efficient and you use a computer too well, you must be a bot! You’re banned.”
My experience every time I try to use most ecommerce sites like amazon
It’s more that abnormal traffic gets flagged, and you end up getting limited
If you have good internet it could make it significantly better
Tcp transfers are limited by the product of window size and latency, if I am in Australia with gigabit internet downloading from Europe then I could be limited at mere megabits with a single connection!
I’ve pulled multi gigabit between Australia and Europe back when I worked at PIA, over OpenVPN over TCP. You just need the appropriately sized buffers and window sizes.
You need extra large buffers because you need to hold on to the packet until acknowledgement in case you need to retransmit it. At gigabit+ with some 300ms to deal with, it can be like some hundreds MB of packets, on top of the regular queue.
But fair enough, that will workaround the issue.
Bingo, that’s the core issue. Big fat windows decrease operating efficiency at large scale and if most clients are nearbyish it’s unnecessary.
I’ve noticed PIA do a good job, maybe that’s your work at play!