I recently discovered this firefox\chrome extension that make streaming videos soo much faster. It also has built in subtitle support that lets you upload subtitles or search through opensubtitles. It's incredible how much faster videos load https://github.com/Andrews54757/FastStream

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[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you have good internet it could make it significantly better

Tcp transfers are limited by the product of window size and latency, if I am in Australia with gigabit internet downloading from Europe then I could be limited at mere megabits with a single connection!

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've pulled multi gigabit between Australia and Europe back when I worked at PIA, over OpenVPN over TCP. You just need the appropriately sized buffers and window sizes.

You need extra large buffers because you need to hold on to the packet until acknowledgement in case you need to retransmit it. At gigabit+ with some 300ms to deal with, it can be like some hundreds MB of packets, on top of the regular queue.

But fair enough, that will workaround the issue.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Bingo, that's the core issue. Big fat windows decrease operating efficiency at large scale and if most clients are nearbyish it's unnecessary.

I've noticed PIA do a good job, maybe that's your work at play!

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nope. Everything has been replaced by Kape's infrastructure, from what I've heard. I worked there 2016-2019, so 5 years ago already.

They did do an alright job with the app though vs what we had to deal with back then. I ran those kinds of speed tests between regions over OpenVPN in part to disprove speed complaints which, Windows + OpenVPN + TCP on Windows 7, yeah the speeds weren't amazing but nothing I could do about that.

It was kind of funny in retrospect though, everyone online was like PIA is faster, no AirVPN is faster, no ExpressVPN and flame wars of which one had the worst speeds. I measured it, it was all the fucking speed/latency curve on the client's side 😂

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 2 months ago

Hahahaha classic. I'm on wireguard so I think it's all UDP now? I imagine the same tuning as OpenVPN UDP?