YouTube videos freeze/buffer/stop All browsers

[Mayuukosan]

Just a small issue I have been having.

When watching videos on youtube, the video will stop for a few moments every few minutes, as if I had hit "Pause" or as if it were buffering, but the buffering symbol never appears.

My connection speed is pretty good - 20 down, 2 up.

Does the same in Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Opera.

Does NOT happen on my laptop - only my desktop (same internet connection) so I am sure it is something to do with my desktop (i.e fixable).

Temps are good (under 40C for everything).

Does the freezing irregardless of quality setting (i.e. 240 or 1080, all freeze the same amount).

I tried that YouTube HTML5 player with no change.

Time of day has no effect (happens just as often at Tuesday at 1:00 as at Saturday at 17:00)

I did a lot of googling but couldn't seem to find anything that worked at all (disabling hardware acceleration, enabling hardware acceleration, upgrading/downgrading Flash, using different browser, upgrading/downgrading my video card driver, and messing with quality settings, waiting for it to buffer, etc.) Nothing made it better or worse.

An interesting note - When I used to leave a youtube video open but not playing, it used to buffer all the way to the end - but now, they just buffer a few seconds ahead as I am playing it. And yet, it doesn't pause at "unbuffered" parts - it seems as though the video loaded but isn't playing.

If it didn't work on my laptop, I would say it was youtube...but on my laptop, videos play smooth - no freezing.

Thanks for any assistance!

[DaveLembke]

My thoughts are ... outdated Flash Plugin maybe .... or issue with Network Adapter which has a hickup to it.

Had a client once with nVidia nForce integrated NIC that acted up and caused similar issues. The solution was to do away with using the integrated nForce NIC since driver update didnt resolve this, and install a $10 Dynex PCI network adapter off the shelf from bestbuy and use this as the main connection instead.

 His issue mainly showed up when running a persistent ping to say www.google.com, almost like perfect timing the NIC would drop out for about a half second and oddly online games were able to reestablish a connection and not drop him as a disconnect, but streaming music/audio and video would stop and start back up again just like this pause like delay condition you have.

So I would open up command shell and enter ping www.google.com -t and watch for dropped ping responses. If the connection never drops then your NIC and network connection tot he internet is healthy, but if you get an occasional lost ping response then I would check into the NIC. *Also look for latency spikes in the ms response times, if you have latency in excess of 200ms your streaming content can act up. I nromally get between 15 and 60ms latency with www.google.com pings when no one is using bandwidth in home. If you have someone sucking up bandwidth and you ping, the pings will be latent competing for bandwidth.

[patio]

Hiccup...

[DaveLembke]

Hiccup...

  Oops ... Typo in spelling, as well as other typing typos when rereading now 

[Mayuukosan]

Hello David,

My flash plugin is totally up to date.

I also tried pinging google.com (even youtube.com when I was having freezing issues) but nope, no lost pings...only myself in the house and I usually have a latency of 10-15 ms.

Also, I hook up directly to my router (it is not a wireless router).

I found a way around it even if it is a bit odd - I can use VLC to watch the video, 720 no lag. Not sure why it loads through VLCs media streaming faster than through YouTube but whatever.

I have a GeForce card actually, and it doesn't have a network interface (that I know of).

Just a small thing that has been bugging me.

A lot of people are saying youtube has switched over to a DASH loading system (?) basically saying that it will only load a few seconds ahead while playing...but even so, my computer/connection is good enough on my laptop for it to load without pauses, so why is my (more powerful) desktop, on the same connection, having trouble? A big headscratcher for me.

[DaveLembke]

Can you watch www.crackle.com, www.netflix.com, or www.hulu.com without the same problem showing up? Crackle is free, Hulu has some free stuff, and Netflix is only playable if you have account active with them. Just want to see if we can isolate this to specifically only youtube or if its all streaming.

The VLC option is used in conjunction with YTD right? If so its playing it locally vs off of a web stream through the normal flash player.

Also the nVidia NIC would only be if you had the nForce chipset on the motherboard which you do not have. Video Cards very rarely have Network Adapters built in. The only examples of a Combo Network/ Video Card I have seen is in older high end HP servers etc which had VGA Video and Dual NIC on a single card on an old Dual CPU Pentium III 1.13Ghz Compaq ML350 as seen here that I use to support which was the main server for a food store chain: http://213.175.108.87/compaq_proliant_ml350g2.pdf

[Mayuukosan]

Good call on other streaming sites.

I don't have a netflix account, but hulu and crackle play fine. (I like Crackle too!) I also watch anime from Crunchyroll without any issues.

And no, I am not using YTD (youtube downloader, right?) I am using the "Media Streaming" option on VLC to play a video from the web (Media > Open Network Stream, enter the URL, and it plays).

It seems it is specific to youtube, except, (like I said before) it doesn't freeze on my laptop.

Something I have tried now is the browser extension "Youtube center" and disabling DASH playback - and it streams fine now. So at this point it is solved.

Thanks!