Re: [CenturyTel] Is CenturyLink throttling YouTube?
What DNS servers are you using? I had the same issue with CL and using opendns. They seemed to be routed all traffic to the same youtube servers and streaming sucked. Once I switched to google dns all was well.
i am having the exact same problem here in denver. i was trying to watch a you tube video last night and it stuttered nonestop.. (buffering over and over). i then found the exact same video on vimeo and it buffered perfectly fine. i also ran speed tests and ran some newsgroup downloads which were getting full speed. when only streaming from youtube i just dont hit my cap that i hit when i do ANYTHING else. my guess is that they are doing some funky routing to youtube servers who knows.. but it is definitely an issue which is ridiculously annoying. currently i am trying to stream a simple stream of a sound track at 720p (
Get the application named jDownloader; it will allow you to directly download a youtube video. Just copy paste the link from your browser that's on youtube into jDownloader. Start the download, and see what speeds that you get.
When i pull 1080p quality videos from my own account@youtube or from other peoples accounts, i am getting a full 10mbps. It's their flash / HTML5 player having issues. Why do I state this "assumption"? I've had the same thing going on for over two months now, and it's not the ISP doing it. It's on youtube/Googles end.
When I use IE & keep the res at either 360 or 480, I have no problems with the video. If I bump it up to 720, then it only wants to load 10% of the video & when the video gets to 8% played, it attempts to try to load the next 10%, but usually the video catches up to the buffer.
However if I try playing the video at 720 thru FF, then it seems to load faster.
The issue is with CenturyLink's cache servers, which are provided to them by Google.
If changing your DNS servers still lands you on their congested cache servers, just start adding them to your HOSTS file.
Can you expound on this a bit more? Do you have any suggested cache servers to add?
I will never be able to land on a CenturyLink cache server, so I can't help you with hostnames, but if you use Wireshark, TCPdump, or even URLsnooper (easiest), you can find out where the videos are coming from. You can also do this with IDM and jdownloader. A lot of cache servers I've seen have the word "cache" somewhere in the hostname, but this isn't always the case.
Just download URLsnooper, open it up and change the protocol filter to 'Show All', then start sniffing. Once you hit a video that loads slow and/or buffers a lot, check where it's coming from and add the hostname to your HOSTS..
127.0.0.1 r4---sn-2gph0nj5o-tt1e.c.youtube.com #//This is one of my ISPs cache servers
I have the same issue from around 1900-2200 local time.
No, it's not my setup - If it was my setup, then I would have buffering issues at every other time i'm on it. And Im on it a lot.
It has to be CTL throttling it at certain times to help "manage" their network. Just about any other time, i can stream 1080p from youtube without flaw/no buffering.
has anyone found a easy solution for this right now its 9pm and im lucky to get speeds over 1.5mbps on youtube, but my speeds on speedtest.net are normal
The issue is with CenturyLink's cache servers, which are provided to them by Google.
If changing your DNS servers still lands you on their congested cache servers, just start adding them to your HOSTS file.
Can you expound on this a bit more? Do you have any suggested cache servers to add?
I will never be able to land on a CenturyLink cache server, so I can't help you with hostnames, but if you use Wireshark, TCPdump, or even URLsnooper (easiest), you can find out where the videos are coming from. You can also do this with IDM and jdownloader. A lot of cache servers I've seen have the word "cache" somewhere in the hostname, but this isn't always the case.
Just download URLsnooper, open it up and change the protocol filter to 'Show All', then start sniffing. Once you hit a video that loads slow and/or buffers a lot, check where it's coming from and add the hostname to your HOSTS..
127.0.0.1 r4---sn-2gph0nj5o-tt1e.c.youtube.com #//This is one of my ISPs cache servers
Yep this solution does work and other people with similar issues that solved it.
Hosts is a file (with no extension) located in your Windows\System32\Drivers\etc directory. Open notepad (with admin privileges), navigate to that directory, select All Files *.*, and open it.
I've been having this problem for about a month; I can't even get a 360p video to play without skipping and halting between 1800-2300 local time on a nominal 1.5 Mb (1.3 Mb tested) CL connection with the default CL DNS. I can download YT videos normally when using the DTA Firefox extension, but it's annoying to have to do that, so I'll try some of the ideas suggested here.