Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video

Could high speed VPN services bypass this?

Edit: Reading the comments, I see that they can.

 

YouTube has become painful to use.

One of the problems, slow video loading, can be rectified by reloading the webpage, I find.

 

This has become a common experience and I appreciate finally having an explanation for it. Regarding HD video I don't even bother trying to stream it. If it's something I really want to watch I use a downloader to get a local copy first and run it from the hard drive.

 

Youtube is a mess for a lot of reasons. I had known a little about these deals, but I never really dug myself into it and truly understood just what all was involved.

 

The firefox add-on "Youtube All HTML 5" solved my problem. Videos load fast. Flash needs to be disabled. The add-on for Chrome is "HTML 5 video for Youtube".On Chrome Flash does not need to be disabled. Videos don't hang and videos stream great. At least it does for me.

 

Today I was reading about this topic on reddit, someone suggested this add-on: smartvideo for youtube

Works for me.

 

Great info & now we know

 

Yeah, Youtube is a PITA to use.
Sometimes i can barely load 480P videos when my internet speed can load 1080P without any problems if its working properly.

 

Same here
And in the past I could press pause and wait for the buffer to fill, but since a while ago it stops loading when on pause and only loads when playing

 

Thats true, YT stops buffering/loading the video when you pause it or sometimes it does loads it very very slowly. I guess its to save bandwidth?

 

I have a 2 Mbit connection and I can watch 720p videos smoothly most of the times even though I am using HTTPS and it maxes my bandwidth.

 

Youtube has sucked for anything but trips down music video lane for a long time now. Between weird and complete system freezes when you try to play some videos, the buffering issues and the godforsaken wasteland that is every single comments section of every clip ever posted, Youtube has in a few short years become pretty freakin worthless to bother with.

 

If you block the "VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE" cookie, comments won't show unless you're logged in. Besides that cookie, I also block the following cookies associated to youtube.com:

Activity
demographics
PREF
APISID
YSC
SAPISID

This does not break basic functionality of the site. You could block LOGIN_INFO but doing so will break displaying your favorites, History, Watch later, etc... I've also retained:

SID, HSID & SSID cookies.