is it just me, or is Youtube extremely slow lately?

[Rich'[ard]]

hey guys,
i dunno if it's just me, but Youtube videos are loading very very slow for me these past few days. it feels like i'm on Dial-up connection. :shrug:

my internet speed isn't all that fast, but it should be enough to stream Youtube i'd imagine.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/703033427.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

it's what we get here in Australia :bang head

anyway, i doubt a majority of Youtube videos need more than 300kb/s to stream without needing to wait.

i'm using Firefox 3.6 atm. could that be the issue?
i tried Internet Explorer and that was even slow...gawd.

anybody have the same problem?

[TollhouseFrank]

dumb as this sounds.... clear your internet cache. see if that has any affect on the download speed.

[PLOBBY]

No I have noticed this as well from both work where we have a 60mb/s connection and school where its well over 100mb/s. It depends what server you get thrown on where some have a much heavier load than others. Its becoming a real issue as of late. Sometimes if you refresh the page you get put on another server that's faster.

[Dermen]

I see the same thing. It seems like 4/5 of the time it is unwatchable because it buffers every 3 seconds. I just stopped clicking on youtube links. If it is something I really want to see I download it.

[Tw34k]

My overall satisfaction with youtube is rolling downhill faster than you can say "To many adds and slow loading speed"

[Omsion]

No I have noticed this as well from both work where we have a 60mb/s connection and school where its well over 100mb/s. It depends what server you get thrown on where some have a much heavier load than others. Its becoming a real issue as of late. Sometimes if you refresh the page you get put on another server that's faster.This. Sometimes switching quality also nets you a quicker server. I've had HD streams load faster than their lowest quality.

[Rich'[ard]]

haha, Tallhouse, i'll do that...but it's really really slow :(
we just signed up for new internet at my dad's house and he gets 8mbps, a fair bit faster than mine, and the videos still don't load without buffering. that's pretty much 1mb/s! how big are the videos if it's not my ISP's problem :shrug:

i remember watching a video 1 month ago, it loaded fine in normal quality, and also loaded fine in HQ. now when i watch that video it buffers after the first 10 seconds.

[Tw34k]

Maybe the massive amount of extra adds they started using recently has something to do with it?

[Rich'[ard]]

hmm...i've noticed they've updated the buttons at the bottom of the video. there's no longer the HQ button, however they've got new 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p buttons.
as if anybody will be able to view 1080p youtube videos when 360p lags for me :bang head:

[benbaked]

Flash. Evil. Despicable Flash. :mad:

[petteyg359]

Flash. Evil. Despicable Flash. :mad:

Second that. Darn fake cross-platform multimedia framework. I don't understand all the hate for Java; it works consistently across all supported platforms, unlike Flash, and I'd be inclined to say Java is far more resource-efficient than recent versions of Flash.

[dgb303]

I was just discussing this with my friend last night, youtube is slowly going downhill it seems - and for a number of reasons. Google is trying to make it more profitable, which includes a huge number of things from pushing video content users into make more fluff videos to generate hits, linking channels for more subscriptions, and breaking individual videos up into multi-episode threads, again for more hits.

While I can't exactly put my finger on it, it does seem that youtube has been much slower for me, but it also seems as if the videos that aren't all the popular are the ones I struggle to keep buffered. I could guess, and it's only a guess, that youtube is reducing the bandwidth on the less popular videos to save money.

Either way it's a damn shame, but totally understandable from google's perspective.

[Rich'[ard]]

i' asked on another forum, and one post said Youtube was re-doing/overhauling? their servers which is causing the laggy videos :shrug:

no matter the reason, its' not good! hope Youtube gets back on track soon.
there's also word that the Australia government is planning to filter our internet, which could be the reason for the slowness recently...but i look on car forums and pictures load as usual. even videos other users post from other video sites load fairly quickly. :bang head:

[Rich'[ard]]

GUYS!
i fixed the youtube issue...slightly.
after some intense googling, it seemed to be my ISP's fault.
my ISP had problems with their proxy and it was screwing up Youtube.
i don't know the specifics, but i simply entered a different proxy into the Firefox settings and videos are loading much faster now...i think nearly back to normal speeds :)

[vgta88]

thats weird i usually download a 32 mb music video, single definition and I haven't noticed any difference. some of them are higher on like vevo. I do notice something though, the download speed seems to burst for the first few seconds of my video then it becomes slower and steady and I don't notice any cutouts. I'm on opera, its not open source but its light weight.

[Rich'[ard]]

yeap i've tried both firefox and IE, and IE is even worse. not only does youtube load slower (before i fixed the problem) but loading pages was slower as well.

youtube might be updating something...but it was my ISP's problem after all. so nobody except people on TPG should be worried :thup:

[Rich'[ard]]

yo peeps,
i found another solution to fixing the problem.
it is indeed not just my ISP's problem - there's something dodgy with my ISP using transparent proxies or osmething...so i have to use another proxy for youtube to buffer fast.

but another way is to add '&fmt=18' to the end of a youtube video and it loads from the Google server instead of the Youtube server. this is faster as well :thup:

[Jolly-Swagman]

;6389198"]hmm...i've noticed they've updated the buttons at the bottom of the video. there's no longer the HQ button, however they've got new 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p buttons.
as if anybody will be able to view 1080p youtube videos when 360p lags for me :bang head:

720p & 1080p load fine for me Rich'[ard] , have heard allot of folks with TPG complain about same issue, but I,m with iinet :rock:

[visbits]

youtube craws to a halt every night when people start watching there stupid, "man hit by boat" videos.

Youtube works great during the day.

[Rich'[ard]]

youtube craws to a halt every night when people start watching there stupid, "man hit by boat" videos.

Youtube works great during the day.

lol yeah i only watch vids when i get home from school/at night. it's damn flobbing slow :bang head:

yeah JS, think it's got a lot to do with TPG. when you google 'TPG youtube slow' you get many pages saying TPG has something wrong with their transparent proxy? (i dunno what this means...but yeah).

it's gay lol.

[JamesXP]

yeah, 1080p works fine for me, with 10mb, even I get slow youtube at times though.