YouTube is painfully slow at home. Help!

October 11, 2009 6:34 AM

YouTube is unbearably slow. What gives?

My internet in South Korea is incredibly fast. I can swing a megabyte a second no problem. Where I am running into a problem: YouTube is at a CRAWL. It can take upwards of 45 minutes to snag a 5 minute video. Downloading a video to desktop chugs at around 9 kb/s. I was inclined to think that this was just a location issue, but it's fine at multiple other locations I've been to.

Poking my nose around the web I saw plenty of other people the world over have had this problem and every single one of them either hit a wall and got over it or had to jump some major technical hurdles to solve it. The major concern seemed to be which server YouTube was serving videos off of, although I couldn't quite make heads or tales of the very tech-y solution.

I already swapped my DNS to the OpenDNS servers as per someone's suggestion: No dice.

So, have you had this problem? How'd you solve it? Where should I start looking?

posted by GilloD to technology (4 comments total)

I've had trouble with YouTube being slow for the last two or three days, (I live in the U.S.). No idea what's causing it.
posted by Flipping_Hades_Terwilliger at 12:49 PM on October 11

Whenever YouTube gets slow for me, I use a proxy or a web proxy. It generally works, as long as the proxy isn't located in the same state as I am. It can be a pain in the ass sometimes finding working proxies, however, this is the only solution I've found that works.
posted by Dreamcast at 1:15 PM on October 11

Is this a constant thing, or just recently? Like F_H_T, I've been having a lot of problems with YouTube being incredibly slow in the past few days (today especially) in the US.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 1:44 PM on October 11

It's been pretty slow for me today as well. I'm in the U.S.
posted by Nameless at 8:06 PM on October 22