• Cold Hotman@nrsk.no
    1·
    2 years ago

    First, what do you mean by difficulty? Like, you can’t select it or it won’t play back at that quality once selected? Something else?

      • Cold Hotman@nrsk.no
        1·
        2 years ago

        Difficult to diagnose since the issue could be on either side of the wall. I’d guess YouTube’s CDN’s and/or differences in requested formats (WebM/AV1 vs. mp4/h264).

        It could be YouTube using a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), which are servers all over the world caching (having a copy) of the videos. They’ve got limited space, and thus only room for the most popular videos. Every video is available in various qualities (360p, 480p, etc.), and I can imagine a scenario where the 360p video is stored “centrally” while the 720p/1080p versions are spread around the difference caches for easy access.

        I’ve experienced up to a minute of load-time on some of my older, obscure, never-watched decade old uploads.