Youtube

[helen99]

You-Tube seems to have become unusable in the past several weeks. The symptoms are, if we start a streaming video, it will pause every 5 seconds and then stay paused for about a minute at a time. Then it will play another 5 seconds and then pause again. Basically the the video buffers slower than it plays. This was not always the case. Two weeks ago, for example, buffering took place faster than the videos played, and they never paused. Browsing various forums, I found and tried the following suggestions:

Try a different browser
Turn off hardware acceleration for you-tube videos
Try running the flashutil files located in C:/windows/system32/macromed/

Didn't work.

We also got a new router and cable just in case that was it. Didn't work.

We thought maybe it was Suse, but that explanation died when we realized it also happened on the Windows laptop.

The only thing I haven't tried is downgrading to an earlier version of flash. That's next - I'll downgrade to Flash 7 if I can find it, and see if that works.

I suspect that it's ComCast, though. Cable has the downside that if the load is heavy, service degrades. Right now it's little better than dialup, possibly because of election and financial foo taking place.

Daggone all of it - I want my You-Tube videos. This is worse than trying to go out for a cup of tea during the holiday season.