But the ISP makes a gigantic difference. I have the benefit of a great ISP (smallish in size, no surprise) and seeing all the youtube jokes about ads always working but not the videos themselves made me somewhat puzzled, as the very few times a video doesn't stream it's just as likely to be the ad that pauses as the main video, and that's super annoying because you can't skip ahead in an ad like you can the main video. I figured that other ISPs were worse, but there must be some exaggeration going on for comedic effect.
Then recently I was at my parent's house for a while, where they are on Time Warner. I really had no idea how unusable it could be. Constant pausing of video for loading every 20 seconds or so, waiting at the very beginning of almost every video, not knowing if a video was loading or there was some kind of error and the page needed to be refreshed.
I'm really used to checking youtube for how to do basic household tasks. Often you'll have to go through two or three to find a good video on a subject. You can't do that at all in that environment, as the waiting is just too much. I'd switch to 240p just to get the gist of a video to make sure I wanted to watch it, so definitely forget any movies you want to see with good quality video. I would queue up videos so at least something was buffered, which meant you have to plan ahead on what you want to watch, totally changing how you use the site.
It's really like a totally different product. I think of youtube as the wikipedia of home repair and cooking (or maybe more ehow or whatever, but the point is that it has an expert video for everything) and I also use it for constant mindless browsing and watching interesting talk after interesting talk, quickly deciding if something is worth watching within 30 seconds by scrubbing around in the video a few times. You can't use it for either of those things, and the desire to pull out your hair while waiting for anything else taints any other use, too.
If I was on that Time Warner connection, I wouldn't be making jokes about how ads always seem to buffer just fine, I would be completely puzzled how other people would think that Youtube was in any way worth using. It really felt like stepping back to dialup.
My connection isn't especially fast, but maybe my ISP does the local CDN thing. People should try it out, because I suspect the transition the other way would be closer to a religious experience, or like stepping out of a time machine. Meanwhile Googlers working on the youtube player might want to all get a Time Warner connection, as maybe designing for that (as opposed to more specific bandwidth or latency limitations) might make for a better player for the many suffering people out there.
I have their second-highest tier, 30Mbps down / 5Mbps up. The speeds I receive are pretty consistent, even during peak hours, according to speed tests.
I often find that YouTube will either work splendidly on my TWC connection, or it simply won't work at all. In other words: perhaps 80-90% of videos I can seek to a new spot in a 1080p video w/o any perceptible buffering... the other 10% of the time the video just refuses to load, or seeking is horribly broken, or it cuts off before the video is finished.
I guess I would agree that, for the videos that fail, YouTube _does feel_ like a different product.
(I should also add that, in my case, advertisements usually work even when the video fails to load.)
It replaces the YouTube player with the standard html5 video player. This alone made my experience on YouTube way better. My connection is slow, so many times I'll just open a YouTube video in a background tab, and leave it loading for a while. With this, I can just preload the whole video. And seeking doesn't make the video reload.
A side bonus, also, is that every video will use the html5 player, so making flash useless on YouTube (one of the few sites that make me keep flash installed). It will also remove the ads, so it might not be your thing for moral/ethical reasons.
My slow 1.5mbps Internet has had awful youtube experience since the player change. I have been downloading most of the videos directly to avoid using it.
I've only used it a few times but it seems to work well. You can choose which video (resolution/quality) to download and then I usually watch 'em later using VLC.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1-click-youtu...
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/video-downloadhe...
[1] - Apparently they added this quite recently http://www.ghacks.net/2013/04/06/youtube-introduces-ultra-lo...
You know you have fucked up player when congestion control http requests spam more than video stream itself.
It makes no logical sense for the player to reload something that was already loaded since that would handily double their traffic (if only in this situation).
Which makes me think they don't actually buffer anymore. The bar just shows a standard, imaginary amount of buffering by default and nobody really cares.
It makes me very uncomfortable how "true" that feels.
Making a general video host is so expensive and complicated that we may have to just resign to use YouTube for at least some more years... but it's easily one of the worst user experiences regarding online videos.
Netflix does this too and it drives me nuts, especially when I'm watching something in HD because it automatically switches to low definition for a few seconds until the high definition version is loaded.
Moreover, the little that is prebuffered seems to behave oddly, you skip forward well within the indicated area that have been buffered, yet the player seems to reset and start re-downloading that part -> unueably slow.
I noticed that they introduced this feature around the same time they removed the right-click option to stop downloading the video.