Ugh. Okay. Lobbies. Fix. Now.

lol, my experience trying to join PA games for the past 1-2 months, it has gotten to the point of me just asking people to invite me so I don't have to look at the lobby and face the tsunami of data.

Youtube streams 1080p at around 250-350kbytes average, depending on how demanding the video is. So PA is effectively streaming 2 1080p videos, to people simply trying to find a game.......

Thank you for the update

There is no way, when I had 300kb/s in England I couldn't even watch 480p youtube videos.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

It's actually a lot higher than people think.

Just so you know that's kbps, which is very different than kb/s.

1000kbps ÷ 8 = would be 125kb/s

So for 1080p video you'd need 1000kb/s, or about 1mb/s.

(Kbps = kilobits per second, kb/s = kilobytes per second, as far as I know)

Those are the recommended bitrates for videos to be uploaded to youtube. Videos which will be re-encode by youtube, at a much lower bitrate of ~2500kbit (300kbyte).

Youtube is constantly changing it's audio and video bitrate settings and compression techniques. So what may have been true before may not now.

Also IPs don't have an unlimited connection to youtube and so can it bottleneck during peak demand. I know with my IP I can only get 360p-480p during the evening but during the morning and late night I can get 720p usually. Even though my speedtests show that my download rate stays the same. So my IPs connection to youtube can only handle so many people. Same goes for Netflix.

Yeah this often is a considerable factor for many things. Just because your own connection tests with some speed between you and a test server that usually is pretty close to you does not mean much about how fast you can connect to some random server somewhere. You can even encounter situations where using a proxy server that routes the data around the whole planet yields you a massive speedup.

Yeah, it is pretty bad. Sometimes it is almost impossible now to play multiplayer games.

If you go to h3xed you can download the video stream of any youtube video, just copy and paste the youtube url into the box, and press enter. Then right click and "save link as" on the respective URL hyperlink. Be sure to download the MP4 versions.

For whatever reason youtube is ok with letting people download 720p videos but not 1080p. And so only provide the 1080p video alone, without the audio as a deterrent I guess. Youtube's website muxes the audio and video together when you play it, on the fly.

So as my test subject I took none other than Uber's HR Kickstarter Trailer, on Youtube in 1080p, which is a fairly demanding video. It's almost 6 minutes long, 114 MB, and an average video bitrate of 2658 Kbit. Not sure if the audio would be 126, 160, or 192kbit AAC, but for argument sake we'll say it's the highest one. Which brings the bitrate to a grand total of 2850kbit (356kbyte) for Uber's trailer. 356 x 2 = 712kbyte. So PA is streaming the equivalent of 2-1080p HR trailers, to people looking for a game to play during peak periods.

Bitrate spread of the entire video


I encode videos for a hobby which is why I seem a bit crazy. I'm also really tired of this unnecessary bandwidth.

Be sure to pick up the re-released "Faster Server Browser Mod" for a dream like experience. tfw the scissor glides through paper

I've played around with writing youtube downloaders in the past and I am sure in the past 1080p was downloadable. Looking at what changed in their page source I'd guess that the difference since then is that 1080p is only available via that adaptive stream stuff which seems to have one set audio quality and a variable video quality file. So changing the video resolution does not change the audio stream at all. Cool stuff youtube is doing there. That adaptive streaming is new compared to when I last had a look this.
My guess would be youtube basically decided that 1080p and up should only use adaptive streaming and their implementation of that results in no "complete" single 1080p file being "available". Youtube itself isn't really "okay" with downloading their videos like that though, there is no official support for that for any format size. It's just easier for the non adaptive video formats as you will not need to mix together the files again, but I doubt that was the intention behind adaptive video streams. It's just a side affect. A funny one though. Last time I wrote a downloader I had to write additional -horribly annoying- code to separate the music from the videos. Now youtube offers a "sound only" by itself. How convenient.

That page is a nice parser for youtube pages, <brag> I used to be able to do that by hand with only an urldecoder </brag>

It would be more efficient to have one computer streaming live video of the lobby browser, than the current updates from the server.

Yeah that thought crossed my mind as well

I spend more time trying to join lobbies than actually playing...

Typical experience when I fire up PA is thus:

Launch PA (from steam)
Go the lobbies
Find a game I'd like to join
Click join.. here the join sound .. nothing happens
Click on some other games to join .. nothing happens
Wait 20 seconds.. try one more time.. nothing..
Get frustrated and go back to reading news @ ycombinator ... come back to PA to try again and find I'm magically in a lobby with people whinging that I haven't readied up in.
Then just as I'm diving to hit ready get kicked out of the lobby for the process to start again.

The lobby experience and hangs while loading systems and the like are just massive turn offs to casual players.
My friends refuse to play because of it (I bought a few copies as gifts at christmas).

The Faster Server Browser mod is now back on the PA Mod Manager (PAMM).

You can also check https://palobby.com/ (chrome desktop only)

Not even 10kbte/s right now. Well done.