Floatplane buffering

[bebarty]

As stated in the title. I have the not premium $5 Floatplane subscription, and every now and then, it'll buffer like crazy. It's also not limited to one device or to devices from one network. As of right now, I'm experiencing this on my desktop, and like an hour ago on my phone on mobile data. Sometimes refreshing helps, but it mostly doesn't.

 

I kinda suspect it's because of being in Germany, there's just to much latency? idk, but it's really annoying.

[lieder1987]

I get this mostly when i am on my VPN. Is that a possibility for you?

[bebarty]

18 hours ago, lieder1987 said:

I get this mostly when i am on my VPN. Is that a possibility for you?

You mean if it's possible for me to get on a VPN, or if it's possible that I'm currently on a VPN?

 

First option: Possible, and I think I'd use ProtonVPN.

Second option: Pretty sure I'm not. I haven't installed anything resembling a VPN on my desktop, and that's still a pretty fresh machine. There's ProtonVPN on my phone, but I'm kinda certain it wasn't on at that time.

 

 

[lieder1987]

yeah I wanted to know if you had a VPN running on your device.

[Matthew W]

I've been having this same problem with Floatplane.  I can barely watch 720p videos smoothly, 1080p isn't really playable without very frequent buffering times, and 4k is basically non-functional.

 

This happens on desktop, on my phone, doesn't seem to matter.  It doesn't matter if it's on my home internet or my phone's data.

Floatplane for whatever reason doesn't seem to buffer videos very well.

 

I'm not sure why it's this way now either.  I've been on and off of Floatplane, and it was never an issue before.  I can't say exactly when it started though, but even a few months ago I never experienced anything odd with playback.  However, now it's really bad.  It doesn't matter what video I'm watching either.  They all do it.

 

Smooth playback doesn't exist, even at 360p.  It'll load chunks fast enough to completely buffer the entire video in like 5 seconds, but it doesn't seem to keep buffering ahead.  It'll do a couple chunks of data, and then it will sit there until the video reaches the end of the buffered content.  Only then does it seem to load more data while you wait.  360p is just shorter wait times as that chunk loads, but it does the same thing all the time through the entirety of the video.  4k is the same but the waits are just longer to the point where a good 2/3rds of your time watching any video is just waiting.  Heck, I might wait a good minute at 4k to just watch 2 seconds of video play, and then get hit with another long buffer.

 

I'll note that the initial video start is also wait time.  It doesn't seem to pre-buffer content at all when you load the page.  So when you first click play is the first moment it fetches any data.  The sad part is I can just hop on Youtube and watch the same video in 4k at the same time it's constantly trying to load on Floatplane and barely play at all. 

 

I'll also note that it's been this way for several weeks.  I have not gone on Floatplane even once recently where video playback has been...uh...functional.

 

No VPN by the way, and I can drive 5 hours north and be in Canada.  I live in a major city, have fiber internet with single digit latency, and as I stated above, it's the same on desktop and on my phone and on home network and mobile data.  It doesn't seem to matter.