Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans
Another good reason to be annoyed by autoplaying videos online: it eats up dataplan allowances, making for some rude surprises. I'm always nervous about data allowances, and sites should be cautious about what they shove at you; turning off the autoplay feature isn't hard (and it's explained in the second article linked above), but I sure wish it was the default setting, or at least caught and handled by a browser extension. (Perhaps this is a job for Social Fixer's next iteration.) Is Facebook the worst offender on this front?
Haven't we seen this news a few days ago already?
...with auto-dupes of last week's stories
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F.B. Purity is available as an addon or GreaseMonkey script and already has the option to disable autoplay, among other things.
I'm not a big sports fan, and at this point the autoplay feature on pretty much every sports site has made me effectively even less of a sports fan since in the infrequent chance a sports news headline interests me I won't bother clicking on it unless it's from a non-sports site.
Some news sites have started to pick up on it, with auto-play videos accompanying articles, to which I have to wonder why they haven't fired the writers if the articles are so worthless or redundant.
it kicks the snot out of the loadtime for the rest of the page as it seems to want to buffer the entire fucking stream first, I tend to go find myself another source. If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit, I'd go find a privately hosted nerd site. Or build my own. With blackjack and hookers.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
...the app. Only the website.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
It's not a problem for me, I use Opera 12, i need to click to activate plug-ins before they even get downloaded from the site!
Facebook slurps up all your personal information and sells it to advertisers. It also slurps up all your friends' and family members' information - even if they aren't on Facebook themselves - keeps it in so-called "shadow profiles", and sells that to advertisers as well. Facebook also routinely changes its privacy controls without notice, and the new versions of the controls default to the most permissive settings - so you have to continually monitor them to "minimize" (in quotes because it's still a lot) how much of your personally identifiable information leaks out to the world at large. And they occasionally make policy changes that force you to share stuff that you'd previously tried to keep confined to within a small group.
And what you're worried about is they might use more of your data plan?
#DeleteChrome
Autoplay, shmautoplay... I'd be thrilled to figure out how to access /. without the auto-refresh crap. I am fine -- more than fine, in fact -- clicking on the page refresh icon myself thank you very much.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Use Adblock Plus or something to add a filter like this: a.fsdn.com/sd/autorefresh-query.js?*
No more autorefresh.
I paid Slashdot $5 or $10 a few years ago, and have't seen an ad since.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yes, Facebook is so terrible with their rude auto-playing videos. Meanwhile there are three advertisement videos started automatically on the front page of Slashdot. Pot meet kettle.
There is. One setting for browser and another setting for the mobile app. But the mobile app will still autoplay if it detects it's on wifi instead of cell data network.
Back when I first started using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox years back, one of its best features was its extensibility. It was easy to install and write addons that could drastically improve the browsing experience.
These addons were almost always adding useful functionality. Firebug is a great example of this, where it makes Firefox much more useful for web developers. I'd also installed other addons that added new functionality to Firefox, like the ability to take screenshots of entire web pages.
These days, though, more and more of the addons I'm installing aren't to add useful functionality to Firefox, but just to fix really fucking stupid design decisions made by hipsters. The UI of Firefox, starting with Firefox 4, has continually gotten worse and worse. Now I have to install a handful of addons to undo these idiotic UI changes. It got even worse when Australis was forced upon us.
Thankfully I don't use Facebook, but if I did, this would be yet another addon I'd have to install that doesn't really improve the browsing experience, it just helps avoid stupidity forced upon us by some hipster designers over at Facebook.
Something is seriously wrong when I have 2 or 3 addons that add useful custom functionality to Firefox, but then another 10+ addons that just fix asinine UI changes made by the Firefox devs, or that block asinine website functionality like auto-playing videos. Seriously, these hipster designers need to go. Everything they touch ends up much worse off.
It's not like Facebook is in cahoots with content providers....
Who uses Facebook?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What do you expect?
"All the cool hip kids got out of college in the middle of the last decade and got employed at all these places. (Microsoft included)
Instead of nice, useful, usable interfaces with the ability to have advanced toolbars enabled for various types of work, we got shit like Ribbon and a triple-bad menu with everything behind it. And because of silly over-optimizations by optimization freaks, the menu isn't even always loaded and can get unloaded to save memory, so when you open the menu, it can lag a little with heavy drive IO, or even an intense-ish program. AWFUL.
Instead of nice, customizable interfaces, we get same-crap forced on us because browser vendors think alienating people,- that surprise me with the ability to be able to even breathe - is a bad thing.
No depth now, all bright solid colors and minimal border use. Gotta have curves everywhere as well, because screw efficient layouts.
"But you have a good computer, why not use those specs to their best ability?"
IT'S A FUCKING BROWSER, THAT IS WHY.
The same shit excuse was used for that god-awful Windows Vista interface with its GPU acceleration. NO, get LOST.
I HATE software now. It is getting worse by the year. Why the hell do people exist? Why can't we just nuke ourselves already? Hurry up Putin, you coward, I don't want to live in this world where even more awful "artists" get their hands on more software and ruin it.
I work for a portal company; if you have one of the major ISPs in the United States, you (well, actually, your non-tech-savvy family members) probably use our services in one way or another. We've been pushing out tablet and phone versions of the portals and we have been forced to add auto-play videos. One of our marketing people was shocked - shocked I say - when he asked me what I thought of our current phone portal and my response was, "I'm glad I have flash blocked and ads blocked." I went on to tell him that I generally don't mind ads if they're not obnoxious, but auto-play videos and all that crap are not only an extremely poor user experience but they also waste tons of bandwidth that I, quite frankly, cannot (and will not) afford on my data plan.
It isn't that us software folks don't tell our marketing folks this stuff. We do. Constantly. We HATE it when we have to add more tracking code and video advertisements and other crap like that, but unfortunately too many companies see only short term dollar signs. They are "Short Term Greedy" instead of "Long Term Greedy" and they will, eventually, be badly hurt because of this.
Mobile Browsers who when you click on them start to download all over again the last page you visited the day before. This page is in 99% of the cases not interesting for me. But the instant reload gobbles up my data plan. Chrome I'm looking at you!
Don't get me wrong.... I hate video autoplay.
But I feel that things like this will ultimately result on pressure on carriers to correct the real problem: The dataplan allowances are way too low, AND 1 Gigabyte of data is priced way too high.
So by having autoplay..... ordinary folks will be using more data, BUT they're not going to want to pay a lot, so there is going to be pressure on carriers to increase data allowances
Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.
I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation.
Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.
I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?
1) I suspect videos tend to be larger than Anim-GIFs by an order of magnitude
2) Anim-GIFs do not have any sound, while video tend to have sound (ie. more data transferred even if muted during playback)
3) Modern browsers have options for disabling auto-play of Anim-GIF, while similar control for video might be up to a 3rd party plugin
Note how Google can use Anim-GIFs as a preview for YouTube videos on Google+ - I'm thinking they aren't doing this because it is fun.
If you're logged into Facebook, this link should take you straight to the settings page where you can disable the auto-playing of videos:
https://www.facebook.com/setti...
This should work for most people - although my brother (on Mac OS X) was not able to see the 'Videos' sub-menu (which for me appears in the list on the left at the very bottom).
I only use the FB website on my mobile (the constant addition of new permissions turned me off the app), and am not sure if you can disable it within the app.
The autoplay feature is very annoying! Here's to hoping that Facebook gets its collective head out of its ass and rectifies the situation.
I got in trouble at work because of this feature. I had facebook open in a tab, and I didn't notice that it was autoloading videos in the background. My job doesn't care if I do some personal browsing during the day, but we have bandwidth limits... I was way, way, way over the limit. Lesson learned.
While empirical evidence: animated gifs tend to have a lower framerate (maybe sub 24 fps?) than a comparable video file, and are usually smaller than 360 pixels across.
Loading an animated gif tends to be longer/slower than the comparable Youtube video.
Additionally, browsers can't detect the difference between an animated GIF and non-animated until it starts downloading (unless there's some new HTML tags that I haven't seen.) On the other hand, browsers can detect if a plugin/video is going to be activated before downloading them, and can trivially add a click-to-play dialog to prevent sudden download surprises.
I haven't seen an option for that in Chrome or Firefox without going third-party - and usually you've already downloaded a chunk of data.
Meanwhile, Chrome can auto-block plugins, allowing you to right-click on a plugin and run it - this occurs before the video/flash content is downloaded, saving bandwidth.
I've never used Flashblock.
I removed Flash from my system.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
browsers can't detect the difference between an animated GIF and non-animated until it starts downloading
Other than that if it's not animated, there will likely be a Content-type: image/png HTTP header. Almost nobody uses still GIF anymore. Those not convinced to switch to PNG a decade ago by Unisys's assertion of its LZW patent were convinced by PNG's smaller file sizes on the vast majority of images and practical high-color support.
But the mobile app will still autoplay if it detects it's on wifi instead of cell data network.
Which would hurt the owner of a Wi-Fi AP with a satellite or cellular uplink. Or does the Facebook respect the operating system's provision to mark an SSID as being metered? (In Android 4.4 "KitKat", it's Settings > Data usage > overflow > Mobile hotspots. There's also a feature for this in Windows 8.)
Your solution is....extreme. Sometimes, I want to watch the video. Chome lets you set plug-in exceptions on a per-site basis, but it is buried away. (chrome://settings->Show advanced settings->Privacy->Content-settings->plugins->Manage Exceptions...)
just add [*.]cnn.com as an exception with "ask" as the new default. I imagine you could do the same to facebook. Now, instead of an autoplay video, you get a nice grey box that you can click, if YOU decide you want to watch the video.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
As others have pointed out, no need for a browser extension to handle this because it's a simple setting. As the developer of Social Fixer, I did post info to users about how to turn this off months ago: https://www.facebook.com/socialfixer/photos/a.382610684341.167165.174424289341/10152145424839342/
Unfortunately, the setting doesn't persist across devices/apps. So setting it on the web won't help mobile anyway. Supposedly auto-play videos were only ever supposed to auto-play if the user was on wi-fi, but I don't think that's actually how it works.
Most of Facebook's decisions and actions are remarkably anti-user. As in, not in the users' best interests, but in the interests of the advertisers, publishers, share holders, and people with the last name Zuckerberg. I often wonder why we all continue to fund this site through content and ad views. It seems like an abusive relationship, but we just won't leave!
[ ps, thanks for the direct link to the Social Fixer site! It won't help with this specific issue, but it will help with many others. :) ]
1) I just went and pulled the first anim-gif I saw off 9-gag, a fairly simple thing of Ralph Wiggum with little motion, so it should compress quite well for an animated gif. Size: just over 400k. I then pulled the first video that showed up on my Facebook feed, a 30 second full motion clip, and downloaded the entire thing (including the audio stream, full quality). Size: just over 400k.
So....?
2) Are you actually sure that it is downloading the audio stream when it does muted autoplay? Not saying that it oes or doesn't, but do you actually have evidence either way?
3) See the reply below.
There's really no argument. If you're going to allow animated gifs, you should allow autoplay videos. So that we can finally put the nail in the coffin of the awfulness that is gif by removing the last common use of it.
And FYI, 400k is not that much. Slashdot is a pretty simplistic website compared to most, and I just measured how much data is downloaded just to read the front page: 1.4M.
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
It also blocks autoplaying HTML5-videos, or at least did so some time ago.
400 kilobytes? For 30 seconds of video? That's barely a hundred kilobits per second. Are you sure that wasn't a reference movie to content at a different URL? Because that's not likely to be anything approaching what most people would call "full quality" unless the content started out as a postage-stamp-sized cell phone video....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
...These days, though, more and more of the addons I'm installing aren't to add useful functionality to Firefox, but just to fix really fucking stupid design decisions made by hipsters. The UI of Firefox, starting with Firefox 4, has continually gotten worse and worse. Now I have to install a handful of addons to undo these idiotic UI changes. It got even worse when Australis was forced upon us....
In my experience, the QA process for those add-ons is not nearly as good as the QA process for the FireFox browser. As a result, the functionality reclaimed by using those add-ons is usually problematic, at best.
The bug-fest called Classic Browser theme, or something like that, which reinstates the functional UI that Australis removed, is what convinced me to leave Firefox in the dust and start using Pale Moon as my browser of choice.
Animated gifs were one of the many reasons I hated MySpace. Luckily you can disable auto-playing videos in your Facebook video settings.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
I'm not lying, that's the actual size, something like 420k. It may have been a bit shorter playtime, perhaps 20 seconds (I didn't time it), but still, it was quite small.
Nobody said videos on Facebook are Blu-Ray quality. But you seem to have weird concepts about how big videos need to be to be good enough quality for a web page. Just as a test, I took an original high quality full-motion video of a concert, reencoded it with ffmpeg, audio codec aac, vbr audio quality 0.5, video codec x264, preset veryslow, cf 33, resolution 512x288 (half original size), 20 seconds. File size? 420k. Of course the video from facebook was darker and quieter, so one would expect it to compress better. If we give my sample concert clip an allowable size of, say, 550k, then I can up audio quality to 0.7 and cf down to 30. Either way, the resultant clip was fine, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a Facebook wall.
Anyway, the key point is, Facebook feeds aren't loading you down with 50 meg videos, they're little couple-hundred-k clips, the same size as animated gifs. And while I haven't measured it, they don't appear to start streaming until you scroll down to them, and look to stop after you scroll away.
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
It's animation at 15fps (cartoon). The video might nominally be 30fps, but the lack of actual motion between frames would be compressed away. They also said full motion. They didn't say it wasn't the size of a postage stamp.
Go ahead, build a browser that doesn't support the video tag. Let the ad networks fall back to Flash. Wait, do any ad networks actually use the video tag yet?