If YouTube stored the entire video in a cache people would yell and scream about that. Oh, I’ve got 2TB of YouTube cache that didn’t get cleaned properly, how annoying.

Well Im a liar. Checked just now and it changed since last time I was looking into this.

cache-control private, max-age=11722 (~3 hours) date Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT expires Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:19:15 GMT

it once again lands in browser cache. I remember a moment when it returned no-cache.

We are back to situation where:

- google doesnt get any info if user with adblocker keeps rewinding in that ~3hour window

- player refetches if you pause for few hours and come back, or decide to rewind 3 hour video to watch again

- your SSD is hammered with gigabytes of useless browser cache writes - might be good idea for Extension overwriting those headers to no-store/max-age=0

I would be surprised if browsers actually cashed the entirety of videos, even if the cash policy allows for it. That does seem like a way to thrash SSD.

They did before switch to no-cache, and I bet they are back at it now. Chrome used to roughly write as much as I watched at ~2-3GB per hour.