Phenquestions
If you are plagued by spinning loading icons and buffering interruptions while watching videos on the Internet, you are not alone.
While the viewing experience is fine for many broadband users, even they may experience buffering issues from time to time that reduce the experience.
Opera Software introduced a feature it calls Video Boost in Opera Coast, a bare bones browser for Apple iOS devices two days ago.
What the company did not mention at that time was that Video Boost is also available for desktop Opera versions. It is not enabled on the desktop on the other hand and how you enable it is different as well.
Both features are built into Opera Turbo, the company's compression proxy service which redirects traffic through Opera servers and optimizes it before it lands in the browser to reduce the time it takes before websites are displayed in the browser.
To enable Video Boost on top of this, you need to enable it first.
Here is how that is done:
- Load opera://flags in the web browser.
- Use the search to find Turbo. This should display two preferences related to Opera Turbo: Opera Turbo, version 2 and Video compression in Opera Turbo.
- Since video compression relies on Opera Turbo 2, you need to enable both.
- Switch both to enabled and restart Opera afterwards so that the changes take effect.
- Alternative: load opera://flags/#use-turbo2 and opera://flags/#use-turbo2-video-compression directly and make the changes.
Apart from enabling the two flags, you need to enable Opera Turbo as well. This is done with a click on the Opera button and a click on Opera Turbo in the menu to enable it.
The flags page does not reveal anything about the feature or how effective it is but the blog post announcing the feature for Opera Coast does. It is based on the Rocket Optimizer engine apparently which is a cloud-based mobile media and data optimization service for operators.
You are probably wondering how well it does on the desktop. That seems to depend largely on your Internet connection. I could not detect a difference but then again, I rarely have issues watching videos on the Internet as I have a good connection (50 Mbit) that is usually not the limiting factor.
I suppose it is worth a try if you run into buffering issues regularly on the Internet. The worst thing that could happen is that you don't notice a difference after enabling Video Boost and Opera Turbo in the browser.
If you try it out let me know if it improves your video experience on the Internet.
