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.

Comments

[drchuck1968.livejournal.com]

Downgrade Flash? Adobe just released Flash 10 today. Not sure if it will help though, if the Comcast itself is the bottleneck.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

ok, tried that - it didn't work.

It worked fine when Macromedia owned it - and until Adobe got its greedy claws on it. I thought if I could downgrade it to Flash 7 that would take it back well before Macromedia was taken over.

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

Are you having problems connecting to anything else?

Have you run a bandwidth test?

[helen99.livejournal.com]

I ran one from here but I'm not sure how accurate it was. It said I had about 130 Kbps upload and 300 Kbps download capacity (vista laptop). Ran it again on SuSe desktop and got 300 download, 360 upload. Ran the same test while actually downloading something (Vista laptop) and it read about 20 download and 100 upload. The download failed, so the answer is yes, there are problems connecting (probably with everything).

I am able to download some things (sometimes) - earlier I downloaded a video (not quickly).

[netdancer.livejournal.com]

Comcast practices throttling.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/20/0255217&from=rss

"Officially" it's to cut down on Bittorent clients.

I'd hate to play a MMORPG via them though..

More data:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/comcast-disclos.html

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately my bandwidth is so low right now I can't see the first link at all (it's taking over 5 minutes to load).

If Comcast *admitted* to throttling the torrents, then they are probably doing the same thing to many more sites that they don't admit to. Perhaps Youtube came to their attention recently.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, everything is slow, not just video -- the problem is just more noticeable with video (so I don't think throttling is the problem). Myspace streaming audio doesn't work well either (artists streaming samples of their own work).

My guess is that the entire financial community is probably glued to the internet right now and using all available bandwidth.

[suileach.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that, too. I usually end up pausing the video and doing something else while I wait for it to finish loading.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

That's what I've been doing as well - streaming doesn't seem to work right now. It's a bit tricky to get some of the videos to pause, though - I have to click the pause button during one of the two-second intervals when the video is actually playing, before it pauses itself.