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Hack to improve YouTube buffering.

mitchellvii

Well-Known Member
One of the things that can slow down YouTube buffering is throttling placed on cached video from your ISP. You request a YouTube, your ISP caches it then sends it to you, throttled to cut down on bandwidth. This can result is laggy YouTube viewing with slow buffering.

This is a hack which tells your computer to download the video directly from YouTube and bypass your ISP caching completely. It has made a DRAMATIC difference in performance and buffering for me. Before employing this, my buffering would run maybe 1/16th of an inch ahead of the video play if at all. After this, buffering runs a good half inch or more ahead of the play - awesome.

Anyway, this is a hack which involves your firewall so use at your own risk. I have not personally run into any issues:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/tired-of-buffering-3-ways-to-speed-up-youtube/
  • Click Start, type cmd, right click on the icon and Run as Administrator to open the command prompt.
  • If you see a UAC prompt, click Yes.
  • Copy this command: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”YoutubeBufferTrick” dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
  • Right click in the command prompt and select Paste.
  • Hit Enter.
If you ever want to remove this alteration from your network, do the same thing except use this command instead:
  • netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”YoutubeBufferTrick”
Since this trick blocks a wide range of IP addresses, you may run into a site every once in a while that’s blocked by this trick. Use at your own discretion!

Here is a screenshot of the buffering for a YouTube running at 1080p. Notice the buffering:

YouTube%20Buffering%20Sample.png
 
Last edited:

double07

Member
I use google DNS, I set it at router so all devices benefit from it. I used openDNS before and found Google DNS is faster at my region.
 
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mitchellvii

mitchellvii

Well-Known Member
I use google DNS, I set it at router so all devices benefit from it. I used openDNS before and found Google DNS is faster at my region.

Google DNS is completely different than this. That is merely a faster nameserver. Google DNS will not improve YouTube buffering performance.
 

hughlle

Super Moderator
Staff member
Good to keep in mind. although not sure if it's my ISP, or country, but i have never had buffer issues, videos will normally be fully buffered by the time i'm a quarter of the way through watching.
 
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mitchellvii

mitchellvii

Well-Known Member
Good to keep in mind. although not sure if it's my ISP, or country, but i have never had buffer issues, videos will normally be fully buffered by the time i'm a quarter of the way through watching.

Yes it's probably your ISP. I use Time Warner Cable and pretty sure they throttle.
 

hughlle

Super Moderator
Staff member
Yes it's probably your ISP. I use Time Warner Cable and pretty sure they throttle.

Why I'm also thinking country. Throttling seems to be a much bigger issue in the USA than here. Or at least that's been my experience. But all good things come to and end once they work out a way to make you pay a premium for the same product, so i'll be bookmarking this for the day it inevitably happens.
 
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