Youtube buffering is really bursty.

[Guest]

I have been trying for most of today to get youtube to work well on my computer.

Setup:

Windows 7 home 64 bit

IE10 version 10.0.9200.16635

Flash player   11.8.800.94

Problem:

     The player will load about 15 seconds of a video and then the buffering progress bar will stop.  It won't buffer any more until the video reaches the end of the buffer and then pauses.  After it freezes for a couple seconds the buffer bar jumps to a quarter of the video and then stops again.  The video plays to where the buffer bar has reached and then freezes again.  At this point it freezes for a very long time and about every 10 seconds or so it will automatically reduce the video quality, all the way down to 260p, then says there was an error and the video can't play.

     Other times the audio will start playing again after the end of buffer freeze but the video doesn't.

What I have attempted:

     I tried it out on Firefox's latest version, and Chrome's latest version.  Same result.

     Tried it out on my wife's windows 7 computer(same internet connection) and worked just fine(She had flash 11.5 installed).  Tried on the other desktop I have(windows 8) and it worked fine there too(same connection).

     Tried uninstalling flash and installing 11.7, then 11.5. same behavior.

     Already tried deleting history and cache of both browser and Flash. Still not fixed.  Deleted the flash player folder under %appdata%/adobe and %appdata%/macromedia.  Didn't work.   Tried uninstalling all java versions.  Still didn't work.  Reinstalled latest java 7 update 25.  Didn't work.

     Tried using Youtube when I didn't have Flash installed.  Worked great.  Could even back up the video without it rebuffering.  Problem with leaving it uninstalled all the time is that I can't use other sites that use flash.

     I also tried disabling hardware acceleration and storage amount to infinite.  Neither of those worked either.

     Watched wireshark activity while trying to watch a video.  Saw plenty of large TCP traffic packets(assuming it is the video) when the buffer would jump but then they would stop while other packets were still going back and forth.  Doesn't look like there is a connection problem with my computer.

     I also uninstalled AVG just incase that was interfering.

Wish I knew web type programming better but this is beyond me.  I am a computer engineer and work in software test but my knowlege is mostly Java and embedded systems.  Is there something I am missing with my computer settings?  My last guess is I would have to start poking around in the windows registry to fix this.  There is obviously something wrong with settings on my computer that either Youtube or Flash doesn't work with well.

Someone know what else I can do?

[C_F_McBlob]

Have you cleared your browser cache recently?

[pwillener]

An interesting problem; "interesting" because this is not something I have ever observed with the current or previous Flash Players.

I have a very similar system as yours, plus several older XP systems around me, and none of these show any such symptoms.  The buffering/loading constantly goes ahead of the actual play - very much faster actually, and reaches the end long before the actual play.

What could be causing this?  Slow Internet connection?  Possibly; we do not know how Flash Player behaves if the connection is slow.

Some questions:

- does Flash Player behave the same if used on a different browser, e.g. Firefox?

- do you have any other computers on the same network; do they behave the same way?

- is your graphics driver up to date?

[pwillener]

ray_a_swtest wrote:

     I tried it out on Firefox's latest version, and Chrome's latest version.  Same result.

Ah, that answers one of my questions.

[pwillener]

ray_a_swtest wrote:

     Tried it out on my wife's windows 7 computer(same internet connection) and worked just fine(She had flash 11.5 installed).  Tried on the other desktop I have(windows 8) and it worked fine there too(same connection).

And that answers another question; I should have read your post more carefully.

[Guest · Accepted solution]

I finally got it working.  As soon as I started showing the problem to my wife it occured to her that she had recently enabled an new setting on the "K9 Web Protection" program she has put on all the computers in my house.  The setting was Force YouTube Safety mode.  As soon as she disabled that setting it now will buffer all the way to the end very quickly.

FYI in case anyone else runs into this problem.  A good extra debug step is to diable any web filtering program(I guess this program falls under the Ad block class of application) and see if the problem goes away.

I am going to go tell K9 they broke completely clean and safe youtube videos.

[C_F_McBlob]

I've never used K9. I have AVG and it does a pretty good job of filtering... when I let it. I DO however, use AdBlock and AdBlock Plus in my Firefox and Chrome browsers, but it doesn't affect YouTube or any news site videos.

[pwillener]

Thanks for the feedback!  Good to know it was at the end so easy to fix...