I’ve been using Watch2Gether for years. Recently I’ve even taken to using it on a nearly weekly basis, for a D&D campaign I’m in with a few friends. I’ll preface by saying I’m not the biggest fan of change, especially ones so visually dramatic, so the new UI really took me by surprise. I can deal with the visual changes as time goes on, but I’ve noticed a significantly higher amount of lag in my Watch2Gether room since this UI update. Switching between videos freezes the entire website for several seconds, and videos often stutter at the beginning as they render. I didn’t notice any of these before, so I can only assume this is a new development after this most recent update. Is there a way to optimize this better?
Like I said, I can manage the UI eventually. The video icons and titles are larger now, which is a bit of a hassle since I’ll need to relearn the positions of some specific tracks that I default to. But my biggest gripe with the new layout is how the “suggest” and “add to playlist” buttons after searching for a video/link has moved, and now isn’t proper buttons but rather hyperlinked words. Visually, I can only imagine this is a nightmare for someone with less than stellar eyesight. Please bring back the big buttons!!
Thanks for your feedback! I appreciate your opinion especially as a long term Watch2Gether user. Regarding the lag… does this happen no matter how you start the new video, wether it’s from the playlist or the search results? Do you see this lag as well when you create a new, fresh room and play the first video?
It seems like it’s only when choosing from a playlist that there’s a significant amount of lag. New rooms have the stuttering while the video renders, but not any lag that is as bad as I’m noticing with our go-to room. Is the amount of videos/playlists causing the lag? I’m hesitant to start a new room though since I don’t want to risk losing all of my currently saved playlists.
I also noticed that the room doesn’t remember the last video that was played (like it did before), and defaults to one specific video (and I’m not sure why, since it’s not even the first video of the first playlist).
Does it get better when you switch to a playlist with no or just a few items? Large lists can cause issues sometimes. I don’t want to you to switch to a new room. I just try to run some tests to figure out what causes the lag
Yes, a shorter playlist also seems to reduce the lag.
Okay… do you have an idea how many items you have in your lists typically?
There is a fix for this in the making. I think it can be rolled out at the end of this week.
Most of my playlists have over 10 videos at the least, but I’d even say the average is somewhere around 20.
A fix would be awesome! Would it also address the issue with the player not remembering the last played video?
Thanks a lot. With this number of videos you should actually not see any issues. There must be a different reason for the lag. Does every interaction with the site feel slow? Or just specific ones? Does it make a difference when you use the site in an incognito window?
Last night I cleared my browser cache and it seemed to reduce the lag significantly. Using and incognito window doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, though maybe I should have tested it before clearing my cache.
Thanks, im glad you found something that helps. Anyway i would be interested in how the lag actually looks / feels like.
It was kind of like the whole website would freeze, and it’d make the whole browser lock up for a bit. Like if I tried to scroll after clicking a video from a playlist, the player would take a while to render the video and then it’d be like the scroll input was delayed by a few seconds and would occur after the video was done and began playing.