Why am I having YouTube problems?

September 22, 2010 12:23 PM

Has YouTube not been working for people or is it just me?

For the last few weeks, virtually every YouTube video I've watched has freaked out halfway through.

The audio will continue but the video will stop, then catch up. When this happens, I try to pause the video to let it reset, but the pause button is also in "hourglass mode" and doesn't respond right away. The result is that I end up pausing and playing a five-second span of the video over and over. Then I have to rewind it back to play it through without problems.

This happens when YouTube is the only tab I have open -- in fact, it happens when my browser is the only thing running on the computer at all, except for background programs. Even more puzzling is that I watch YouTube in Chrome, which is a product of Google, which owns YouTube. I thought if any browser would be YouTube-optimized, it would be Chrome.

Is it me? Or is YouTube having bandwidth issues? It really seems to be on every video, whether it's an official movie studio channel or just a random person, including my own videos. And it's been happening for weeks.

Thanks for your help.

posted by Flying Saucer to computers & internet (10 answers total)

Are you able to watch other online videos with no problems (Vimeo, Hulu, etc)?

Also, do you have YouTube running on Flash or HTML5 beta?
posted by shakespeherian at 12:25 PM on September 22, 2010

Happening to me, both at work and at home, on both work and home computers, and in Firefox and Chrome.
posted by inigo2 at 12:38 PM on September 22, 2010

Yes, this has been happening to me too. Videos on Youtube as well as embedded Youtube videos. (Firefox via Comcast FWIW)

(I even considered asking it as a question here too, so thanks, it's always good to know that It's not "just me".)
posted by NoraCharles at 1:53 PM on September 22, 2010

OOH! OOH! OOH! Me too! Near exactly the same thing. I am hoping someone can solve this mystery for me...us!
posted by peagood at 1:54 PM on September 22, 2010

Me too! I uninstalled and reinstalled Flash yesterday as per their instructions but it didn't help. I was about to embark on more troubleshooting, so thank you for saving me the trouble.
posted by Wordwoman at 2:45 PM on September 22, 2010

Are you using Adblock?
posted by cmoj at 3:28 PM on September 22, 2010

No AdBlock, but I've set Chrome to block pop-ups (apologies if that's the same thing).

A four-minute long Vimeo video just worked fine.

Also -- glad to know it's not just me.
posted by Flying Saucer at 5:41 PM on September 22, 2010

We were having massive YouTube problems until I changed our DNS server to one of Google's. Works like a charm now.
posted by azpenguin at 6:17 PM on September 22, 2010

I'm running Chrome on a mac... I can't see that it has native popup blocking. Might be different from windows (if that's what you're using), but I had this problem until I disabled the "block YouTube ads" option in AdBlock.
posted by cmoj at 9:36 PM on September 22, 2010

I got my possibly related question answered by a YouTube engineer over here, FWIW.
posted by allkindsoftime at 12:28 AM on December 14, 2010