> So maybe thats why they do it and not some evil plan to annoy you from saving the video
I guess it's a bit of both. A technically better solution that also helps your marketing is simply a win-win-situation for them.
But it's kinda ironic that the upgraded the user experience with better playback while similarly degrading it by disallowing hotlinking. Typical sidegrade.
Curiosity made me check, looks like they are just using DASH, its pretty common to break apart audio and video when using DASH so I personally still don't see any explicit malice there.
On the video I used I saw 5 video encodes (96, 240, 360, 480, and 720 - it could be that the orig video was 720 so there is no point encoding a 1080 video). So yeah, it saves then have atleast 4 dupicates of the audio if each video was in its own container also containing audio when you can mix it client side.
I also put the reddit URL into youtube-dl which downloaded the two pieces and murged them just fine.
So for me personally I'm still going to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one as its a pretty common way to do streaming video these days. But I see your point that it came with an added benefit to them that it makes it more difficult to hotlink to the video, but its still easy enough to download and rehost elsewhere.
I guess it's a bit of both. A technically better solution that also helps your marketing is simply a win-win-situation for them.
But it's kinda ironic that the upgraded the user experience with better playback while similarly degrading it by disallowing hotlinking. Typical sidegrade.