Youtube videos are suddenly buffering/freezing all the time?

gdtrfb

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Oct 31, 2012
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Suddenly, almost every youtube vid that I watch freezes up either right at the start or while I'm watching it...

Check list:

trace routes / pingtest / speed tests are perfect......getting 50+mb download

computer is less than a month old.. i7 processor, 8gb ram

other sites video streaming, no problem

tried 4 diff. browsers

cleared cookies/cache/temp files and rebooted

This is happening in the middle of the night as well, so I don't see how it could be a high traffic issue

So, any ideas to solve this very annoying problem?
 

gdtrfb

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Oct 31, 2012
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It doesn't matter...they're all freezing up...but HD probably makes it worse. The weird thing is that I can occasionally click even a 1080p vid and it loads almost abnormally fast...but then the next 15 vids will be doing their thing and freezing/buffering constantly even on low res
 

arabmohanad

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Jan 26, 2013
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First try running Google chrome but with disabling all extensions.
Then try uninstalling the flash player and shockwave player then install them again.

Maybe you are using a plugin for youtube that is causing the problem.
 

linuxdork

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Apr 9, 2013
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Disabling hardware acceleration in the Flash settings seems to have fixed my issue. Thank you so much! The question now is, what caused this? Is it an issue with the latest version of Adobe Flash?

 

Yglesias

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May 13, 2013
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PixelOz1

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Aug 10, 2013
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Hi I'm PixelOz from Puerto Rico and even here I had had a few issues including among several buffering weird pauses and slow performance etc. with YouTube too (my ISP here is called Liberty Cablevision) and I was able to solve them all with a bit of research and trying several things.

A few weeks ago I started to have all kinds of trouble with YouTube with one particular PC in my house, an HP Pavillion G6 with an A6 CPU and Win 7 64 bit. The first thing that I was having was that the Safety feature at the bottom of the YouTube pages started to appear as On and when I tried to switch it to Off all I had was the famous "An error occurred message blah blah that is all we know wait 30 seconds" but I tried several times to reset it back to Off but I only got that message over and over (no matter if I waited the 30 seconds or more).

The other thing that started to happen was that I got the write captcha letters page all the time with this message: "We have received a large number of requests etc. blah, blah from your location" or something like that but I tried to input the catcha and it would only display the same error page as with the Safety On feature and would not allow me to watch any videos whatsoever.

These problems were happening with all browsers (IE, Firefox and even Opera and Chrome) but at least with IE it allowed me to input the capcha and it accepted it and allowed me to continue to see videos but not so the other browsers and the YouTube Safety remained in On status no matter which browser I used.

The other issue I started to have around the same time or shortly after those is the crazy buffering pauses and therefore the playback head getting stuck all the time, the video then sometimes jumping out of sudden to the end after the pause and overall a triumph if I managed to get to see a whole video at all.

Again this was happening with all browsers but only with this particular PC that belongs to my niece. We have other PCs in the house including a higher end desktop and two other laptops that belong to different people and one of those is a similar laptop (a HP Pavillion G6 but with an A8 CPU and Win 8 64 bit instead). The desktop uses Vista 64 bit and the other laptop uses Win 7 64 bit too.

None of those PCs were having any of these issues with YouTube. They all had the Safety thing in Off position and none were giving me the captcha problem or the weird pauses either so I knew that in my case in particular it could not be an ISP issue, in this case it was obviously a local issue in this PC and that is one of the first things that some of you guys should try, to use a different PC (of course if you can access one) like a friend's laptop for example that you can try at your location to see if it is an outside issue or a local one in your particular area or network or with your particular ISP because if it doesn't happen with other PCs it then becomes pretty obvious that the issue is a very localized one.

If it happens with all PCs you could have a bigger problem but in the case of the Safety On and the captcha page appearing all the time for me in this PC I found that it was an IP related issue and that it could be handled by turning the cable modem off for 5 minutes and then starting it again so the modem assigned a new IP (a lot of ISPs these days work with Dynamic Addresses as you probably know) which is my case so I did that and turned the modem off for 5 minutes and when it came back "lo and behold" the Safety had resetted to Off in the YouTube page in all browsers and the capcha page appearing all the time disappeared. This particular 2 problems did not return after that.

The third problem (the bad frequent pauses and playback stopping altogether) remained but again only in this particular laptop so I said to myself "OK 2 down a and one to go" ja,ja,ja. With the other PCs YouTube was working as it always did for me. We have 5 megs speed at home and I tell you that that it worked perfectly for me with videos (99 percent or so of them playing smoothly even at 1080p) so the download speed was not an issue (I run speed tests here and there to see how things are going anyway) and besides it couldn't be because it was happening only to this one PC.

I was trying to figure out what was different with this particular PC and I tried all the regular stuff like deinstalling and reinstalling Flash and even Shockwave and deinstalling and reinstalling Java, tried other portable browsers, starting the browsers (like the Firefox which is the one I use the most) in Safe mode and disabling all plugins but the problem did not go away. I also tried disabling my firewall (I use Comodo firewall) and that didn't solve my issue. Tried all the remove all cookies, history, cleaning completely the cache thing, nope, problem was still there.

Then thinking along the same line of what was particularly different in the configuration of this laptop I remembered that I had installed in it the K9 parental control software because we have a small girl in the house. So I removed this software and voila! the problem was gone, the weird playback pauses in YouTube disappeared in all browsers and they have not come back so in this particular case it seems that this software was causing the problem. I have yet to get in contact with the K9 people because I think that this could to be filed as a bug report.

The K9 software has an administrator mode that you can enter with a password that unblocks all restrictions temporarily but even with this the YouTube playback problems continued.

I have not tried to use the PC with another parental control software yet but I will soon. Now, if causes the same problems like the other one it will be out too of course.

I also saw somebody on the web having big issues similar to mine with YouTube in their work computers and they were able to trace it to a local problem with their hardware firewall that was restricting in some way or another the YouTube addresses and when they opened exceptions to YouTube the problems disappeared completely too.

So sometimes these problems are external ones but a lot of times they are local related either to your local network or even to one PC or to a few PCs only and it is important to try to determine if the problem is localized or external first. One way to determine if it is related to your ISP or to your modem or anything like that is to try to move your PC to another Internet access point to see if it goes away.

Of course this can only be done in most cases with laptops, as for desktops it will be more difficult unless you have a good friend with Internet access (with a different ISP best but it could be good to test it with the same ISP in a different location too of course if it is possible) that allows you to test your desktop in his/her home for a little while. Another possibility is to take your desktop PC to your workplace if it has Internet access with permission from your boss of course to test it for a while after hours.

In my case as you can see it was obvious that it was localized to one PC only because in all the others including smartphones and tablets YouTube worked fine.

Anyway I hope that this info with my particular experience can help some people with some of their YouTube playback problems. Some other tips given here by some others my help them too cause it seems that there could be several different problems causing this. Some people have had success from the Mitchbar trick posted here by Monsterpuff, others by disabling hardware acceleration. Others say that changing from Flash to HTML5 playback in YouTube solved the problem for them so it seems that no single answer handles the problem for everybody. Look how in my case it seems to have been an issue with the K9 parental control software cause after removing it the problem has not returned.

It is possible that some people do have problems with their ISP or it may be a problem with YouTube itself sometimes but just don't rush to those conclusions as the only answers cause as you can see it is not always the case.
 

LCRJR

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Nov 20, 2013
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This works, tried alot of things suggested on many forums but this did it for me....http://lifehacker.com/preload-entire-youtube-videos-by-disabling-dash-playbac-1186454034 since I had no extensions enabled that were suggested to disable or such, this was the answer. :)
 

LCRJR

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Nov 20, 2013
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This works, tried alot of things suggested on many forums but this did it for me....http://lifehacker.com/preload-entire-youtube-videos-by-... since I had no extensions enabled that were suggested to disable or such, this was the answer. :) Thank You Lifehacker !!!