Why do YouTube 1080p videos buffer when I have a fast Internet connection?

[Bizkit]

Youtube loads stupidly slow on my iPad 2. Like I can get maybe 30 seconds of playing any video before buffering. I live alone and this is with nothing else using the net. Go to the same video on my desktop and video loads fine on highest quality. Granted it only has maybe 20-45 seconds of video buffered ahead of what I'm watching, but if I don't see any pauses I don't really care.

[PyX]

Same here. Everything loads lightning quick, but not 1080p videos. I?m in Montreal, 12 hours away in car from New York if they have any servers over there.

[Ryster]

They throttle videos that are not popular.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Why would they wan't to throttle unpopular videos? Unpopular videos by the very definition are not viewed very often and have little effect on their bandwidth requirements.

[sagum]

Heres 2p worth...

Setup - I'm on a 50MBit line, VM, wired all the wya, fast pc, all updates etc works fine. Connection is great in games, and can easily max download speeds from speedtest.net, usenet and download sites with fast enough hosting.

On youtube I'll still get buffering on videos, but it depends when and what I'm watching.

Usually the advert for a video will load fine as they're on the front end cache and I'm guessing all their content delivery network servers have the said video providing a lot of bandwdith.

When it comes to watching the video itself, there is sometimes buffering and I've narrowed it down to a few things so far..

If the video is a very recent upload, ie its still showing ~302 views on a usually popular youtube channel, then it might be that the while the video's have been uploaded to youtube they've only just finished encoding them on the server for the different sizes, 480, 720, 1080 etc AND they're still populating the CDN servers that are closer to you., so rather then you watching the video from a CDN cache in London or Manchester, you might have to load the video from New York servers.

This is why in somecases the 720p video will play without problems yet the 480 or 1080 content will still be buffering. If the channel is normally popular, the owner can help things along by publishing the video an hour or two after the encode is finished rather then as soon as its ready. That'll give youtube time to copy the video around to where it needs to give best performance.

Also, youtube doesn't throttle videos that are not popular, they just don't populate the CDN servers close to you with every video, but rather the ones that are popular in geographial areas. For example, if the video is popular in the UK but its rare that it gets played in canada, then it make sense that the video only gets pushed to the CDN in the UK. The few that do watch from Canada will/might get buffering problem.

I did try a program a while back that helped speed up youtube videos loading by using multiple connections. It worked really well, just in the same way mutli part downloaders work, but it was a paid app and .. well I can deal with buffering at times :)

[calimike]

http://www.youtube.com/live is not support in ipad, ipad 2, new ipad (3rd Gen) & android tablet. wtf? :cry: I hope Win8 tablet should support youtube live :laugh:

[Rudie32]

Its puzzling why i can barely watch a 1080p video streaming on youtube using my 30/5 internet but i can download it using the full capacity of my line. Annoying.

[+John Teacake MVC]

Its all down to the saturation of the links (Hops) between you and YouTube servers. Dont forget you may have a 100Mbit line but its not all about that. Its like having a 200Mph Car and driving it on a Motorway during Rush Hour? Get it...

[Salty Wagyu]

Making two connections to the video transfer looks to be the solution according to posts here, but for now expensive paid software is the only choice. Can't be hard for Mozilla and Google to implement it in their browsers surely? Or a firefox addon?

[exotoxic]

Making two connections to the video transfer looks to be the solution according to posts here, but for now expensive paid software is the only choice. Can't be hard for Mozilla and Google to implement it in their browsers surely? Or a firefox addon?

1000 users @ 1 connection = 1000

500 users @ 2 connections = 1000

50% reduction in users that can connect :rolleyes:

[soldier1st]

I've seen some 240p and 320p videos slow to load as well. Only way to effectively speed them up is using something like Speedbit Video Accelerator which opens up 2 connections to Youtube to double it up. It worked in the trial I used, but I'm certainly not going to pay for full version with the ridiculous price they ask for it.

Apps like Speedbit Video Accelerator are just gimmicks. The only possible use for it is for dial up or for super slow networks.

[Lachaln]

So i had this problem whenever i would watch a video 720p or higher but i was using my data and then switched to using wifi and it worked for me but idk how other people's might work but if you have been using you data then switch to using wifi and it might work

[dipsylalapo Supervisor]

Please don't bump old threads.