Playing youtube through low bandwidth 200k to 750kb/s - PreCache?

[DaveLembke]

I am at a hotel that offers free wifi with option to pay to get higher bandwidth. I dont want to pay $7 for 24 hrs of 4Mb/s bandwidth and when everyone hits the free internet at the same time the available bandwidth plunges from the 750kb/s that they state to sometimes as little as 70kb/s but averages 200kb/s when everyone is online evenings. I was wondering if there was a way to precache the playback of youtube so it doesnt play for 5 seconds and stop for 15 sec etc?

I have Firefox as my main browser on this laptop. I thought that if I would start the video play and pause playback that it would continue to download the entire video, but the download stops after about 49 seconds is downloaded.

*Is there a size that needs to be adjusted somewhere maybe in browser etc to download the entire video for playback after its fully downloaded without using a tool like Youtube Downloader which is questionable legalities based on what you download etc?

 Would rather not use YTD to play videos. At this hotel for a week on systems training, so would be neat to find a way to be patient with the limited free bandwidth and be able to play the videos after they are fully downloaded to temp file etc for play.

Too bad I cant connect with multiple wifi connections since they have 3 different open wifi zones in range to multiply bandwidth with USB wifi NICs...LOL   

Update: Added a pic of the hotels offer blanking out their name etc. If my employer was paying for internet, I'd live it up, but cant see paying in 7 days what I pay almost for a whole month of my current broadband plan at home.

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[patio]

I usually just start the video...then pause it and grab an adult beverage of my choice...
You will notice by doing this when you come back the progress bar is at the end...depending on the connection speed of course.

[DaveLembke]

Tried setting video on mute and play till end and then go back to it and use slider bar to bring the video back to like 1 second mark to play from and after I get about 1/2 way back I notice that the grey area that shows the content is downloaded is lost as if it dumps to grab new information off the web if you try this. Tried this on 3 different videos with same results.

I then tried instead of moving slider bar on the youtube playback window to instead click the play again circle icon on the bottom left and this also dumps the cached content and forces new information to be downloaded.   

[BC_Programmer]

Pause the video and wait for it to buffer. Exactly as Patio said.

[DaveLembke]

Just wanted to state that this is now closed. For some reason short videos you could pause and when finally downloaded/buffered you could unpause and play them, but videos that were greater than like 10 minutes long when moving the slider bar back to 0:00 from say 15:43 it would lose over 1/2 of the information, so it would play fine for like 7 minutes of the 15:43 and then cartwheel as its trying to re-download the information off of youtube etc.

Fortunately I am no longer at the hotel and am back home on high speed internet and so the problem is gone until I face this issue again at some point.

[jchunk]

This might help though Ive never tried this feature so cant vouch for it http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/browsers-cache-youtube-videos.html - For next time lol