Topic 'Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?' in forum 'Charter Internet/TV' - dslreports.com

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 08:34:37 EDT

greenman posted :

...I use DNSMasq (DNS Forwarder »news.softpedia.com/news/Local-DN···41.shtml) on my ASUS-N16 running Tomato-USB Toastman, so I which ever is giving response queries the fastest is the one that is giving me the best connection;

I'm using Toastman build on the Asus RT-N16 too. It's awesome.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 07:58:22 EDT

badboy54166 posted : I must live in the Bermuda Triangle for YouTube download speed, because I've never had an issue.

Also I do use alternative public DNS servers ALONG with Charter's and I also don't have any issues.

I use DNSMasq (DNS Forwarder »news.softpedia.com/news/Local-DN···41.shtml) on my ASUS-N16 running Tomato-USB Toastman, so I which ever is giving response queries the fastest is the one that is giving me the best connection;


Highlighted - Public DNS servers (OpenDNS OpenNIC, Google) the rest are the Charter servers recieved from the Modem.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 09:58:50 EDT

greenman posted :

said by Ricky Martin :

Youtube buffering always use its own mechanism for buffering videos, character is not even involve in buffering, so which concludes if you want to buffer your videos on your server than it should be optimized properly, and for your ease here is a links where you can get the idea of optimizing buffering: [ url deleted ] last time when i faced this problem, i found this link which helps me a lot...

Thanks

I'd rather not buy and install software that 'tunes' my computer. They are generally a waste of time, often causing more crashes than they are supposed to fix.

said by JTY:

It's a Youtube issue. They have video servers all over the place. Depending on popularity of a video, it may not be widely distributed across their system. As well, they use GeoIP to find you the closest server to you, which is why it can be fine from one IP, but not from another.

I doubt it is a YT issue. As I said earlier, when I proxy into YT bypassing the usual Charter pipeline, streaming is pristine.

Because I'd tried several different name servers (Charter, OpenDNS, Google Public DNS) and still saw the same problem, I suspect the problem had to be with Charter. However, the problem seems to have since resolved. Streaming is now behaving properly on all machines in my house regardless of time of day or resolution.

I can hope that Charter scans these forums and resolves issues found here, but it seems unlikely that we'll ever find out how the issue resolved.

Thanks everyone for listening. :)

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:44:09 EDT

JTY posted : It's a Youtube issue. They have video servers all over the place. Depending on popularity of a video, it may not be widely distributed across their system. As well, they use GeoIP to find you the closest server to you, which is why it can be fine from one IP, but not from another.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 06:49:01 EDT

anon posted : Youtube buffering always use its own mechanism for buffering videos, character is not even involve in buffering, so which concludes if you want to buffer your videos on your server than it should be optimized properly, and for your ease here is a links where you can get the idea of optimizing buffering: »www.youtubebuffering.com/ last time when i faced this problem, i found this link which helps me a lot...

Thanks

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 14:02:37 EDT

DrDrew posted : Have you tried using Charter DNS?

Charter may have a local YouTube server farm arrangement which OpenDNS and Hurricane DNS isn't using, since they're generic non ISP specific lookups.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 11:25:57 EDT

greenman posted : We'll here's the weird thing. When I go to the /my_speed link, I come out as if I'm in Swansonboro, NC and am compared with Road Runner users with average download speeds of 7.49. But I'm in Georgia using Charter and my download speed is tested reliably at 15.

I decided to try foxyproxy with my web server in California. Anything I stream from YT through foxyproxy via the California streams flawlessly at any resolution. Unfortunately, I can' keep doing that to my webhost.

I should note that the /my_speed data comes out as Los Angeles when I run the link on FoxyProxy. (7.04)

A couple things could be the problem:
1. Charter is busting my youtube bandwidth.
2. OpenDNS is messing with my youtube bandwidth
3. Hurricane IPV6 DNS is messing with my youtube bandwidth.

Any ideas?

Anyone using Google Public DNS?
Edit: I've just tried Google's public DNS and the results are pretty much the same as with OpenDNS and Hurricane, so I can only suspect the problem must be Charter. Using Google's Public DNS, it still shows me as coming out of Swansboro, NC.
:mad:

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:40:39 EDT

anon posted : that number is actually an everage

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:01:47 EDT

DrDrew posted :

said by King Boo :

http://www.youtube.com/my_speed

what speeds you get? i get 12.2

That speed is to single well distributed video. It doesn't give the speed of every available video server farm.

From that video I get 21-25 mbps download rate, but I still frequently run into other buffering YouTube videos.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 23:14:25 EDT

mmainprize posted : I get 11.2

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:54:38 EDT

anon posted : »www.youtube.com/my_speed

what speeds you get? i get 12.2

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 07:50:17 EDT

cork1958 posted : Sure you can!!

Isn't anything "broken" for OP. Just a plain old overloaded site.
--
The Firefox alternative.
»www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:42:53 EDT

anon posted : I use youtube every day have for the past 2 years or so. Never had an issue with videos keeping up. Be it in 360p or 1080p. I can open like 10 videos at once and not have a buffer issue... I dunno why yours is broken.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:11:17 EDT

Kamika_Z posted : As others have said, it's a Youtube issue. Something to try is changing the video quality - and I don't necessarily mean decreasing it. Youtube's infrastructure is a bit nuts, and all copies of a video may not come from the same server. I've had plenty of times where moving from 360/480p to 720p or 1080p has cleared up buffering issues.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 23:28:33 EDT

DrDrew posted :

said by greenman:

I hope they can figure it out before they seriously lose viewership.

I've seen complaint of it for the last 3-4 years. It really started to get bad when they rolled out HD video streams
--
If it's important, back it up... twice. Even 99.999% availability isn't enough sometimes.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:57:38 EDT

cork1958 posted : Half the reason I very seldom even go to YouTube.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:17:54 EDT

greenman posted : Thanks for your reply. They're buffering it too aggressively. I can understand stopping short of finishing the download. CNet does this well. Hulu does this well. But with YT, sometimes I wait 30 seconds for the next 15 seconds of streaming. It's damned annoying, and a poor user experience. I hope they can figure it out before they seriously lose viewership.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:13:59 EDT

mmainprize posted : This is done by Your tube to save some bandwidth.

Say you start a 30 min video, and after 5 min you think this is no good and change the page to something else.

If they did not buffer it you may have downloaded the whole video in the 5 minute and then started another on a new page. By buffering it they only sent what was need so far.

Times this by 1 million users and the amount of bandwidth saved is a lot.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:19:15 EDT

greenman posted : Thanks for your reply. I guess this means we're not going to see a resolution any time soon.

Re: Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:08:03 EDT

DrDrew posted : Look around other forums, it's a YouTube issue. It's not Charter.

You'll see people on TWC, Comcast, FIOS, ATT, etc. all complain of the same thing, especially when close to major metro areas:
»/nsearch?q=&q=···er&sa=Go

Seems some YouTube server farms are more popular and crowded than others.
--
If it's important, back it up... twice. Even 99.999% availability isn't enough sometimes.

Youtube Buffers. Hulu does not. What gives, Charter?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:54:33 EDT

greenman posted : When I watch a hulu video on any computer in my home, there is no buffering. When I watch a Youtube video, they buffer. I can't figure out why this should happen. This is true regardless of browser or computer. The results are the same.

Hulu is always HD. Youtube buffers regardless of whether its HD, 380p or 360p. It just buffers.

Is Charter choking youtube bandwidth but not other streaming sites?