Works great for Twitch-length stuff. For a 10 second gif-equivalent, you don't get enough scale up time.
I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate, I'd sooner have a video buffer for 10s than end up with something that's unwatchable because the resolution is like 10x10.
And I'm barely exaggerating, I don't have an amazing connection but I can stream Netflix and Amazon Prime in 720p without any issue, yet I just got this on Reddit:
https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-142013_redditvideo.jpg
This is not upscaled or anything, that's literally what I saw on my screen as the video was playing.
It's just half-assed, there's no other explanation really.
Many uploads on reddit are also repeated re-uploads of compressed and then recompressed ad nauseum videos and stolen content, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fairly significant amount of the uploads started at 360p or less, downloaded from a phone.
> I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate
You are not the target demographic; the target are mostly on phones, where rapid start and 360p is not a huge deal. You don't get 1080p or 720p from snapchat or instagram. In super blunt terms reddit would rather not want you, they'd much rather have someone with the app downloaded, all tracking on, with push notifications on and the impossibility of ad blocking.
In your example, the video thumbnail implies that this is a recording OF a recording - this is someone that has already uploaded a compressed version to Twitter, where it has been further compressed, and then recorded and cropped on presumably a phone screen, then uploaded to reddit.
If I google the text, the first reddit results are all natively in 240p uploaded original.
I activated throttling in Firefox, setting it to "Regular 3G". I went to Youtube, selected a random video I had never watched before (so no cache): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mMIOhoUcCM
It loaded for about 10 seconds then started playing at 480p. Quality was fine, it's SD but sharp. Once it started playing it wouldn't buffer anymore: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-153915_youtube.jpg
Then I went on Reddit, same settings, this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ib6gmu/i_pretended_t...
Reddit ends up playing in 96p apparently (judging by the file name, DASH_96, altough maybe it's misleading). It looks like this: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-153748_redditvideo.jpg
Note that in the "optimal" version of the video the text on top is perfectly sharp.
So you can spin that any way you like, doesn't change the fact that Youtube performs vastly better in the same degraded conditions. But maybe the target demographics are people who have a fetish for ultra blurry video?
