Why Is Everyone Having YouTube Streaming Issues? > Youtube throttles itself

Youtube throttles itself

From what I've heard, it's quite likely to be a config change in the actual Flash player and not Youtube- if you set the allowed data storage quota to "Unlimited", youtube will happily buffer the whole video.

reply to anon_anon
This is actually related to the way that YouTube encodes the videos now. In order to be "HTML5" compatible, they break up the video into small chunks, and use those, instead of a large file. It used to be they could rely on the Flash Player to cache only a section of video but with the new format, they simply grab one file at a time, and don't grab the next one until you reach a certain trigger to grab it.

That's not true. HTML5 streams as one big file. You can inspect the network connections while loading an HTML stream from YouTube and you'll pull a direct link to a full video.

reply to anon_anon
The throttling I believe only applies if you're watching on a lower video quality where they throttle it on the CDN-end for a lower bitrate video. HD Videos tend to saturate your entire connection. The buffering is also controlled by the Flash player, which can be manipulated using JavaScript. I use a Greasemonkey script called YousableTubeFix, for example which does just that