youtube has slowed to a crawl

July 3, 2012 1:00 PM

Does anybody know of a recent youtube or flash or browser update which has crippled youtube video caching?

My internet connection is not the world's fastest. Up until very recently I have had no problem whatsoever watching any youtube video I want by loading the video and after it starts playing I hit the pause button. Then after a few minutes or a half-hour at the most the entire video will be cached and I can hit the play button and the whole thing comes out of cache uninterrupted.

This has stopped working and I do not know why. Currently the cache seems to have a hard upper bound of ten seconds at the most. (As per the youtube speed guide I have erased my cache and browsing history.) Is there a switch that has been made that I can do something to override? A different youtube site? An updated to flash? Videos have basically ceased to be useable on my computer. I was having paranoid thoughts yesterday that some bandwidth hogs have written a virus to sabotage others' bandwidth and my computer has gotten infected with the sucker.

posted by bukvich to computers & internet (7 answers total)

How long has it been doing this? I ask because youtube will do this for me intermittently, but especially during busy times of the day.

You could also try a different browser.
posted by royalsong at 1:16 PM on July 3, 2012

YouTube will no longer cache the entire video you're using the default Flash player. I assume this is to save bandwidth on their end (i.e., someone pauses a long video, then never watches it). However, if you use the HTML5 player, it will cache the whole thing.
posted by zsazsa at 1:34 PM on July 3, 2012 [7 favorites]

Its been like that for me for months so its not just you.
posted by missmagenta at 1:35 PM on July 3, 2012

As a workaround, you could always try using RealPlayer to download the video you want to watch. It would take about the same time as it used to take your browser to cache the video.

While RealPlayer used to be just terrible, the latest iteration is quite useful in that it downloads Flash videos, and even slices and dices clips.
posted by KokuRyu at 1:54 PM on July 3, 2012 [2 favorites]

zsazsa it looks like you may have me worked around. I now have 24 minutes of a video cached and I have not seen that in a couple of weeks. Do you think the people at google would be interested in knowing there are people out here in the boonies who loved their service a month ago but if we can't cache more than ten seconds their service is completely worthless?
posted by bukvich at 2:01 PM on July 3, 2012

I use keepvid.com all the time. Just put in the YouTube url and - presto- your download options are ready and you can grab the highest resolution available. It's free, easy and safe. I've used it since 2007 almost weekly.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 3:35 PM on July 3, 2012 [2 favorites]

Another choice for saving the vids to watch is DownloadHelper.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:56 PM on July 3, 2012 [1 favorite]