Video Playback and Search Improvements Introduced by Google Drive

How often has it happened that you go ahead and open a Google Drive link to watch a video only for it to buffer and lag? To be fair, issues like these have been prevalent with Google Drive in the past, which is where new changes have been introduced recently.

According to the latest news, Google Drive will introduce a few updates in the upcoming days that will specifically target the platform’s usability. The developers have emphasized that their focus is on streamlining the user’s experience with opening and watching video files.

No longer will you have to struggle with video buffering and the lags that are quite prominent when you are trying to access a video. Not only that, the new update will also improve the search functionality available on iOS devices.

Moving forward, with the introduction of the new update, Google will increase the “timeout time” for Looker and BigQuery, respectively. All of these features are being rolled out gradually, which further explains their popularity.

Google Workspace updated users about these new features and updates with a blog post. In that post, the developers clarified that they are smoothing out and improving the playback experience of the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) video. This will apply to all videos uploaded and shared via Google Drive. The local network quality will influence the watching and streaming experience, though.

The introduction of these new updates in Google Drive is expected to introduce two transient changes:

• The video join time, which is basically the time it takes for the video to start after clicking on it, will be conveniently a lot less.
• Furthermore, the users will also not have to worry about the video buffering, which is again a pretty common issue that’s common among the majority of the Drive users.

Google developers have confirmed that these new changes or updates will be applicable to the new videos that are uploaded to the Drive. So, if you were hopeful that things would be different for all the videos, that’s not going to be the case – At least, not yet.

Also, the search upgrade is currently only being introduced for iOS users, and it might be rolled out for Android users down the line. The query filters will be an interesting and helpful addition, to say the least.

Initially, for testing purposes, these updates were made available to Google Workspace corporate clients and subscribers. So, if you have yet to receive the updates, we suggest you wait for a few days to enjoy them.