Need a web proxy that plays nice with YouTube

April 16, 2013 7:19 PM

For some reason, my home Internet connection and YouTube hate each other. I can watch videos fine with a proxy, but I'd like to find one that will display the site properly. Any advice?

If I just point my browser at YouTube, more often than not videos will buffer endlessly, taking many minutes to load even a few seconds of content. And thanks to the site's new backend that buffers only a few seconds at a time, I can't just leave the video to load on its own when it's having problems; I have to watch ten seconds, let it load for a while, watch the next ten seconds, etc. This is not satisfactory. When I use a web proxy, videos load much faster and more reliably, but for some reason most proxies either don't work with YouTube at all (the video just says "an error occurred.") or substitute their own Flash player for the site's native one, stripping out features like larger windows or resolution options in the process. Is there anything out there that will let me use the native site, and also isn't run by hackers?

posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Hi there, I have the same problem on Verizon FIOS, so curious as to your ISP as well as any good answers :)
posted by wrok at 7:49 PM on April 16, 2013

Response by poster: I'm on FIOS too. Iiiiinteresting.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 7:54 PM on April 16, 2013

You can adjust youtube buffering with the smartvideo addon (firefox, chrome).
posted by holloway at 7:56 PM on April 16, 2013

If Time Warner is your ISP, you may be able to solve this without a proxy.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:07 PM on April 16, 2013

Try using google public dns before you try anything more drastic. That's my go-to solution for slow YouTube and it works nearly every time.
posted by emptythought at 10:46 PM on April 16, 2013

Best answer: Just to help narrow things down: If your computer is portable, does this happen on other networks, like at a café or library, or only at home? Does this happen with just Flash, or also the HTML5 player?
posted by vasi at 12:31 AM on April 17, 2013

@emptythought: The video file would be at one consistent URL so I doubt that improved DNS resolution would be able to interrupt video streaming.
posted by holloway at 2:37 AM on April 17, 2013

holloway: YouTube may use the address of the DNS resolver to affect the result, so that the nearest edge node to the requestor is given back.

Other options, if buffering cannot be fixed: youtube-dl or jwz's youtubedown (requires ffmpeg or mplayer).
posted by mkb at 5:24 AM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm also on Fios. The instructions in this post fixed the problem for me.
posted by backupjesus at 9:35 AM on April 20, 2013

Response by poster: Switching over to HTML5 did the trick. I wasn't sure at first if it was that or just borwsing videos at lower-traffic times, but it seems to be working around-the-clock. Thanks!
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:26 AM on April 23, 2013