Hack to improve YouTube buffering.

[mitchellvii]

One of the things that can slow down YouTube buffering is throttling placed on cached video from your ISP. You request a YouTube, your ISP caches it then sends it to you, throttled to cut down on bandwidth. This can result is laggy YouTube viewing with slow buffering.

This is a hack which tells your computer to download the video directly from YouTube and bypass your ISP caching completely. It has made a DRAMATIC difference in performance and buffering for me. Before employing this, my buffering would run maybe 1/16th of an inch ahead of the video play if at all. After this, buffering runs a good half inch or more ahead of the play - awesome.

Anyway, this is a hack which involves your firewall so use at your own risk. I have not personally run into any issues:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/tired-of-buffering-3-ways-to-speed-up-youtube/

• Click Start, type cmd, right click on the icon and Run as Administrator to open the command prompt.
• If you see a UAC prompt, click Yes.
• Copy this command: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”YoutubeBufferTrick” dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
• Right click in the command prompt and select Paste.
• Hit Enter.

If you ever want to remove this alteration from your network, do the same thing except use this command instead:

• netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”YoutubeBufferTrick”

Since this trick blocks a wide range of IP addresses, you may run into a site every once in a while that’s blocked by this trick. Use at your own discretion!

Here is a screenshot of the buffering for a YouTube running at 1080p. Notice the buffering:

 

[ctitanic]

I implemented the hack and so far so good.

 

[mitchellvii]

I implemented the hack and so far so good.

Good. Works very well for me. Hopefully the Russians aren't using my computer to start World War III.

 

[double07]

I use google DNS, I set it at router so all devices benefit from it. I used openDNS before and found Google DNS is faster at my region.

 

[mitchellvii]

I use google DNS, I set it at router so all devices benefit from it. I used openDNS before and found Google DNS is faster at my region.

Google DNS is completely different than this. That is merely a faster nameserver. Google DNS will not improve YouTube buffering performance.

 

[hughlle]

Good to keep in mind. although not sure if it's my ISP, or country, but i have never had buffer issues, videos will normally be fully buffered by the time i'm a quarter of the way through watching.

 

[mitchellvii]

Good to keep in mind. although not sure if it's my ISP, or country, but i have never had buffer issues, videos will normally be fully buffered by the time i'm a quarter of the way through watching.

Yes it's probably your ISP. I use Time Warner Cable and pretty sure they throttle.

 

[hughlle]

Yes it's probably your ISP. I use Time Warner Cable and pretty sure they throttle.

Why I'm also thinking country. Throttling seems to be a much bigger issue in the USA than here. Or at least that's been my experience. But all good things come to and end once they work out a way to make you pay a premium for the same product, so i'll be bookmarking this for the day it inevitably happens.