Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans 108
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?
Slashdot dups also chew up expensive data plans (Score:2, Informative)
Haven't we seen this news a few days ago already?
Slashdot chews up expensive data plans... (Score:5, Funny)
...with auto-dupes of last week's stories
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Actually it's been moderated 80% funny and 20% informative.
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One's right to life, liberty, property, speech, press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote
Unless of course, if you're black, gay, or an undocumented immigrant...
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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 un
Re:Autoplay is EVIL (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 th
Burn All GIFs (Score:2)
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.
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Almost nobody uses still GIF anymore.
Habit is a strong force. And programs still list it higher on the default outputs list. The space savings isn't always that great without using a tool like pngcrush, which is just a lot of extra work that nobody really bothers with.
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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
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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....
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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,
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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.
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get F.B. Purity (Score:3, Informative)
Yet more addons that fix hipster design fuckups. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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...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.
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Or you could just change the Facebook settings without downloading additional crap.
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Until FB change it back again without telling you.
Oh my god, how horrible. My videos may autoplay again.
Sorry but the possibility that someone may somewhere change a setting is still not enough to warrant going through the effort of setting up browser plugins to do what is already just an optional tickbox.
Also you're assuming that people want a really basic system. Most people don't. As platforms like snapshat and twitter have shown they tend to augment things like Facebook.
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Or you could just change the Facebook settings without downloading additional crap.
Not with the latest Android app, you can't. The "Video Auto-play" option was removed.
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Not sure you're trolling, or just so immeasurably blind / stupid that you can't find an option that is on the first page of the settings.
Re: get F.B. Purity (Score:2)
Also see: sports sites (Score:1)
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.
autoplay sucks anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit
Doesn't it? I don't have flash installed so it doesn't happen to me, but I seem to remember it beginning to occur recently if I visited slashdot with chrome
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If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit
Doesn't it? I don't have flash installed so it doesn't happen to me, but I seem to remember it beginning to occur recently if I visited slashdot with chrome
Is it the ads? For all that site operators hate Ad blockers they forget to look at the bandwidth and compute resources their own advertisements take up. Especially flash ads.
Of course, even if most sites did fix that issue, all it takes is one obnoxious site that's needed for something to convince a person to install an Ad blocker. Then there's the user tracking aspect....
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I keep Slashdot on the whitelist to try to help support the site, but just today an ad auto-played. If advertisers don't knock it off, I'll sadly have to remove Slashdot from the list.
Pay For Ad Free (Score:3)
I paid Slashdot $5 or $10 a few years ago, and have't seen an ad since.
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And I haven't paid them dick and STILL don't see any ads.
So you are a free-loading asshole?
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And I haven't paid them dick and STILL don't see any ads.
So you are a free-loading asshole?
Some of us earned it via means other than money. But I'd actually be open to whitelisting everywhere an adserv which promises and delivers malware-free and video-free ads, and even doing things like helping it know what ads to serve me. (I'd see it as cutting down on my need to figure out who actually has what I want: if I can do that, and they don't point any ads my way, then I am fine with figuring they don't want my sale.)
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I keep Slashdot on the whitelist to try to help support the site, but just today an ad auto-played. If advertisers don't knock it off, I'll sadly have to remove Slashdot from the list.
Slashdot is part of a big conglomerate [wikipedia.org] these days. They're publicly traded which means their every thought must be about how to make more money for the shareholders. There's no need to feel guilty about blocking ads here. Do it, and be proud.
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They're publicly traded which means their every thought must be about how to make more money for the shareholders.
Why does this FUD still get mentioned? It is bogus misinterpretation of a court case. Please stop repeating it.
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Because of things like this:
http://bgr.com/2014/08/15/appl... [bgr.com]
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A fiduciary duty is a legal duty to act solely in another party's interests. [...]
Examples of fiduciary relationships include [...] a director and her shareholders.
source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex... [cornell.edu] (aka the first google result for "fiduciary duty")
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No, they must try to make a profit, if that is what the corporation is for. Not all are. But the specific wording I objected to was:
They're publicly traded which means their every thought must be about how to make more money for the shareholders.
There is nothing saying that larger profits are the only thing a corporation can think about or focus on. If that were the case, every time a corporation gave to charity, or used company resources (money, vehicles, personnel, publicity, etc.) to sponsor an event, they would be sued by the stockholders for ignoring their fiduciary duty.
So, no, the fiduciary duty of a corporation
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No, there is a legal obligation to act based on another party's interests, not based solely on another party's financial interests. Shareholders have interests other than money—having clean drinking water for their kids, supporting cultural growth, improving the quality of education, not getting buried in lawsuits from the government when you cross a legal line (though this one arguably is financial, just over the longer term), and so on. That's why yo
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If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit
Doesn't it? I don't have flash installed so it doesn't happen to me, but I seem to remember it beginning to occur recently if I visited slashdot with chrome
Is it the ads? ...
Yes, it is. I just had audio suddenly come blasting out of my speakers. I hunted down the tab where I had the Slashdot homepage open and closed it, and the sound went away. I really can't afford to have stupid video ads sucking the bandwidth away from my VoIP when someone might call me, or weird audio coming out of the blue when I am on the phone with a client, so I guess I just won't be coming here much anymore.
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They don't forget, they simply don't care.
There's a huge difference. The guys in marketing want their fancy ads and their impressions, they don't care about your bandwidth.
Re:If slashdot ever decided to pull this (Score:2)
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.
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Use Adblock Plus or something to add a filter like this: a.fsdn.com/sd/autorefresh-query.js?*
No more autorefresh.
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Sorry, CIG built one such site already, and guess what, they exceeded 52M bucks received.
Re: autoplay sucks anyway (Score:2)
Firefox has a tap to enable, or click to enable for flash plugins now. I believe it is default now, since v3. I think.
Socialfixer can't fix... (Score:2)
...the app. Only the website.
Not a problem for me (Score:3)
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Same here.
Stop whinging about your browser allowing shit and treat data from the Internet as untrusted and unable to initiate actions without your explicit consent.
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Absolutely not a problem for me - I DON'T USE FACEBOOK!
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Wi-Fi with metered uplink (Score:2)
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 [microsoft.com].)
Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
Data plans have an immediate cost at the end of the month.
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Data plans have an immediate cost at the end of the month.
Not everyone has a data cap. Does that invalidate the parent's point? Nope, didn't think so.
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Not everyone has a data cap.
And not everybody who does have one can afford to move to an area served by a carrier that doesn't impose one.
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I've never used Flashblock.
I removed Flash from my system.
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I Just Want Your ATTENTION!! (Score:1)
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.
Laff (Score:1)
It's not like Facebook is in cahoots with content providers....
Who uses Facebook?
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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.
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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?
I Work For a Portal Company (Score:1)
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 hi
Mobile Browsers too (Score:1)
IMO this is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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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
Or pressure on the customers to pay more. Guess which one is automatic?
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Or pressure on the customers to pay more. Guess which one is automatic?
This is why it's so important to make sure there can't be any major mobile carriers doing any further consolidation and buying out of competition. Customers should be free to move away from carriers that will want them to pay more.
Ob Red Dwarf: (Score:2)
Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation.
Turn off Facebook video autoplay (Score:4, Informative)
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... [facebook.com]
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.
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-1, anti-informative
That setting affects auto-play in browsers, not in phone apps which is what the original articles explicitly refer to.
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Annoying (Score:2)
Got in Trouble at Work (Score:2)
No need for Social Fixer... at least not for this. (Score:1)
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