Member Avatar for drjay1627

this is a general question. do you think that a bandwidth estimator can be used to measure the bandwidth and optimise a users video viewing experience.

in other words, if i have a 56k connection can i still watch youtube or for that matter a live stream? of course if the stream is really low you probably could pull it off but realistically is it possible to have a decent stream?

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in other words, if i have a 56k connection can i still watch youtube or for that matter a live stream?

Of course you could however you need a buffer if the download rate is slower then the display rate. Just from the top of my head, the formula to calculate the buffer percentage would be as follows:

Example rates
d=download side per second = 150kbps
x=internet speed = 50kbps
v=d/x
v=100/v
'v' now contains the percentage of the movie that needs to
be placed into the buffer before playing.

So as you can see, the above is a simple equation to work out the buffer which is what youtube uses however most sites unfortunately don't place an equation such as this one to work out what the buffer needs to be for each user. Instead they just put something like a 10 second buffer and make those with slower internet suffer the slow speeds.

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