No youtube buffering anymore?

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SadYouTuber
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No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by SadYouTuber »

OK, so I'm not sure what's up here, but today I went to youtube and no matter what video I load, buffering appears to be blocked.

E.g., my typical habit is to hit pause and let the whole video buffer up (or a lot of it anyway) before I hit play - thus no annoying pauses or jerkiness while streaming.

Now for a lot of videos, most of the time, my connection is fast enough that I don't usually get a lot of pauses; but sometimes I do (if my roomie is downloading something for instance). Plus I have a ton of friends who are still on dial-up (no, they don't have DSL in most of rural America) and this is the only way most of them can watch a video, even a short one, is to let it buffer up before they hit play. Sometimes that takes HOURS, even for a short video, when you're on a rural dial-up line.

Now I haven't changed anything here, and I also ran FF in safe mode just to be sure there were no add ons interfering with things; doesn't seem to be the case.

So I don't know if this is strictly a FF problem. But I don't know where else to try to get some help with this.

Does anybody know what's happened and how it can be fixed? A setting in the browser? Does it need an add-on? Did somebody at youtube get a wild hair and block buffering for some insane reason?

I can always download via realplayer or one of the download helpers but I've got a lot of older folks living out there in the boonies who I trained, sometimes with some difficulty, to count on buffering so they can still watch youtube stuff (there are old movies and things on there some of these folks just love to be able to watch). It would be a Bad Thing if this was messed up for good!

Any info would be much appreciated. Thanks.
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mightyglydd
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by mightyglydd »

If you've updated Flash recently you may want to read these threads...

viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2485553
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2485319
#KeepFightingMichael and Alex.
SadYouTuber
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by SadYouTuber »

Yeah, that's not the problem. Youtube will PLAY - it won't BUFFER.

You know, where you push pause and then wait until the little gray bar creeps all the way over to the end - then you can play without getting pauses which it would if it tries to play over a slow connection in real time.

Besides I have ver. 11.2.202.235 of flash. That's the version everybody seems to be backing down to to fix those problems you mention.

Also, the Adobe website says 11.3 does not support Vista 64 bit OS which I am running - so I'm not about to "upgrade" to a version that won't run on my OS.

But thanks anyway.
mtot
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by mtot »

Vista 64-bit can still run 32-bit programs. There is no (released) 64-bit Firefox. You must have misread - the current version of 32-bit flash works on XP (although without any protected mode), on Vista 32 and 64-bit and Windows 7 32 or 64 bit. 64-bit versions of flash are only used in 64-bit browsers which Firefox is not.
SadYouTuber
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by SadYouTuber »

Note:Flash Player does not support 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista. Flash Player 11 now includes support for Windows 7 64-bit.

Don't think there's much to misunderstand there.

So anyway - could we get back to the thing about why youtube won't buffer? Pretty please?
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JayhawksRock
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by JayhawksRock »

SadYouTuber wrote:So anyway - could we get back to the thing about why youtube won't buffer? Pretty please?

You could try changing the Flash Player local storage settings for youtube or globaly See > http://www.macromedia.com/support/docum ... elp02.html
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is you never know if they are genuine" ...Abraham Lincoln
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dfoulkes
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by dfoulkes »

Yeah, I noticed the same thing today on YT... I see now that when you click play it loads and even when you hit pause it keeps loading for about 1 minute of play but then stops... then if you hit play it starts buffering ... then if you pause it stops etc... I checked my stuff in Flash player... not changes are seen... I mean, they are the same as they have been. I also tried this test out in my Test profile (some minor extensions) and saw the same thing. I was thinking that maybe my Adblock may have been working too hard.

I did view vids in some other non YT sites and they buffered ... so YT is messing with our lives.
As you can see she's (The CAT) always alert and on the prowl for Meoware !!
MM in WA
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by MM in WA »

I noticed some lag in typing(passwords/web address etc), as well as youtube videos. It would buffer, but still lag/pause etc. I disabled the plugin-container "feature in the "about:config".
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.(default setting)
hit enter so set the "value" to read false.(dom.ipc.plugins.enabled;false)
shutdown FF, and restart.(check task manager to see plugin-container.exe is no longer running)

All seems to be OK at this point.
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dickvl
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by dickvl »

YouTube now seems to download the media files in chunks and only loads the next chunk(s), maybe because the (HD) files keep getting larger.
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dfoulkes
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by dfoulkes »

dickvl wrote:YouTube now seems to download the media files in chunks and only loads the next chunk(s), maybe because the (HD) files keep getting larger.

Yeah, I noticed that while playing a vid the buffering would only go so far and then stop and if I paused the vid it would still be stopped and then if I clicked on play it would load a little more chunk and then stop... kind of kept going on that way.
As you can see she's (The CAT) always alert and on the prowl for Meoware !!
Guest
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by Guest »

Its DRM from youtube and adobe they changed this permanently a month ago yet no one seems to want to talk about it. It only loads one little portion of the video at a time uses cache mapping, then deletes it so you can't copy from your cache.
flaneurb
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by flaneurb »

dickvl wrote:YouTube now seems to download the media files in chunks and only loads the next chunk(s), maybe because the (HD) files keep getting larger.

Just curious but are these chunks 1.7-1.8 MB for you?

(*) I wrote a little thingy to extract all files larger than a particular size from cache and that worked well for a while, but now, probably around the time OP started seeing the buffering problem, most I see is 1.7-1.8 MB files except for the HTML5 types. And it happens in Seamonkey and in Opera as well. So FF isn't the villain here.
flaneurb
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by flaneurb »

Guest wrote:Its DRM from youtube and adobe they changed this permanently a month ago yet no one seems to want to talk about it. It only loads one little portion of the video at a time uses cache mapping, then deletes it so you can't copy from your cache.

I think they don't yet do that for HTML5. Or maybe they're converting only stuff free of copyright restrictions to HTML5 ???
But you're spot on. There's not much being said. If you have a link to spare, do share.
BikeHelmet
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by BikeHelmet »

I personally find it annoying, because now I can't seek all over the place without having to wait constantly.

Because of that I started downloading Youtube videos rather than watching them on-site.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ownloader/

Skips all the ads too. Heh. These companies make their own problems.
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LIMPET235
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Re: No youtube buffering anymore?

Post by LIMPET235 »

Hi,
I just tried YouTube & I get the same intermittent buffering.
This is with the default YouTube settings.

Image


This is with 720 HD selected.

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(Always choose the "Custom" Install.)
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