Rants, Raves, and Praise → [Rave] SmartVideo FireFox addon - fixed YouTube problems!

For the last little while, the usability of YouTube for me has been pretty terrible. I'm on a somewhat slow connection, but it's still fast enough to stream 360p reliably.

However, YouTube's new feature of auto-selecting the video quality settings seems to disagree, and will often drop the quality down to 240p or even 144p!!! Very annoying.

Also, there are times when I want to watch a video in higher resolution, despite my connection not being fast enough. Normally I would pause the video and let it buffer all the way through before playing it, but since several months ago, YouTube will only buffer approx 1 minute of video then stop.

Sometimes even at 360p, YouTube will spaz out and keep jumping rapidly between cache servers for no reason, causing a massive slowdown.

Enough is enough!!!

I started looking around for ways to force YouTube to buffer entire videos and force the quality setting without having to manually select it on every video, and eventually came across this addon:

»addons.mozilla.org/en-US ··· -mytube/

Haven't been using it for very long (one day), but so far so good. Every video I have watched now defaults to 360p and stays at 360p (you can change this to your desired quality setting in the addon's options), and streams without any problems.

If I pause a video, it will buffer all the way until the end, not just one minute like it did before.

Furthermore, jumping back and forth through portions of a video that have already buffered now works as it should.

Big thumbs up to the developer of this addon!

Thumbs down to the programmers at YouTube that thought all these new "features" were a good idea. It was fine how it was before, why did they have to break it by adding dysfunctional auto-quality and restricting buffering to one minute?

Anyways, I'm glad I found this addon, and hopefully some of you who read this will find it useful too.

Terrific news that just an annoying and downer problem was fixed for you by the add-on!

I clicked on you link and if I understand what the description says this is an add-on really for those with slower connections.

I watch YouTube a lot. Every day for years. During the past five years my speeds as been in ascending order 3, 10 and 25 MB down. You know I've had problems similar to what you describe but somewhat different and certainly not at bad.

It was only when I hit the 25 MB speed that I could consistently play all videos at speeds HIGHER than 360p. Naturally I had problems at 3 MB down. But at 10 MB with good latency and a clean line and quality packet delivery I had problems with videos of most 720p and even some 480p and that you should not expect. This was at regular intervals and at any time of the day.

So go figure. Glad you can enjoy YouTube. I find it literally one of the most fun and entertaining as well at times educational products of the Internet.

quote:

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force YouTube to bugger entire videos

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force YouTube to bugger

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BUGGER

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That's a bugger of a typo!

Also, I may just have to start using Firefox for my Youtube viewing. I hate that it doesn't buffer up to the end of the video.

Before getting the higher speed connection and not knowing of the type of ad-on mentioned one way I mitigated the problem was to start the video and then pause it. I then would wait the minute or two while the paused video continued to buffer and get ahead. When I felt the buffered video head start was sufficient that the video wouldn't "catch up to it" I then would hit play and watch an uninterrupted video.

Back in the day, I used to buffer whole videos on my laptop, head off to my favorite coffee shop/bakery, and watch uninterrupted videos despite the shop's flaky wifi.

Nowadays even on a wired connection at home, sometimes the pathetic buffer they allow isn't enough. Youtube is kinda shitty that way sometimes. At least when the buffer was unlimited, I could pause the video and do something else for a while.

I blame whoever put the "g" key right beside the "f" key.

I believe it will on videos with resolution of 720p or higher. That's been my experience. I always manually select the highest resolution available (except for 1080p which my screen can't support).

There is much better add-ons and scripts available. That developer doesn't keep up.

Examples?

I use it now, I still will keep atube catcher though. that addon is also available for google chrome as well.

I use "YouTube HD"

»addons.mozilla.org/en-us ··· inition/

Does it fix the buffer-while-paused issue? Doesn't sound like it from the description.

In other words, say you load a video in 360p, and you hit pause, does it buffer all the way to the end, or does it stop buffering partway through?

I have no clue, my internet connection is 20/5 so i watch everything at the highest the video was made in and my Mac is hooked up to a 32" TV so i dont have any of the issues you do. Most videos load instantly.

The SmartVideo addon is not for people like you, it's for people with the opposite problem of having a slow connection.

Preload Entire YouTube Videos By Disabling Dash Playback:

A few years ago, YouTube switched to a streaming protocol called Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, or DASH for short. While it's more efficient in most cases, you probably know it best as the thing that only lets you preload the video a few seconds ahead of the playhead, no matter how fast your connection is. Luckily, it's easy to disable.....

»lifehacker.com/preload-e ··· 86454034

Nice!

Didn't know anything about this "DASH" thing before now.

Still, it's unfortunate that such options are not included directly in YouTube's settings. Instead of giving users with slow connections the option to disable DASH and let video preload, they offer lower resolutions that nobody would ever want to use. Seriously, I prefer waiting for preload than watching a video in 144p!!!

Yeah, it is a pain when it happens. I just happened to stumble upon that Lifehacker info while perusing the site. Hope it helps!

Pony up for faster internet. Cheapos.

I would if it was available, best I can get is 3/1.

At my current location, satellite internet is the only service available, and I have the fastest available plan already.

Even 3G is not an option. As a matter of fact, there's no cell service available at all.

Well, I kinda did. I have FIOS with a 50Mbit downstream.