Does Youtube perform well for you lately?

I noticed since the night of April 28 Youtube has had a hard time playing 720P videos. Some play fine, like this (it buffers in a few seconds and plays great)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m6j4Y-mxHw

But others just buffer and buffer even at 480.

VIMEO plays in HD perfectly and I can still download at 1.6 to 1.7MB per second on my 15mbit cable connection. It's just Youtube that seems to be weird.

QUESTION? Do you guys have the same problem lately?

YouTube has not been a smooth experience for quite a while for me. Many videos are laggy and many stop mid-way through, "buffering" endlessly (30 Mb/s stable fiber connection, so not an issue on this end, unless there should be some ISP throttling at play.)

I haven't been experiencing any problems generally. Though YouTube has always provided a slow loading experience for 720 and 1080 videos that aren't massively popular, which is to be expected given how their internal load-balancing system works.

I wish they would improve 480 quality though. A high-quality 480 is better than a low-quality 720.

I have a 25 meg FIOS connection at home, and youtube is almost never good for me, it usually takes me longer to load a video than it does to watch it, the buffering part way through the weird reset glitches should I choose to watch at a resolution higher than 480. Its just a mess. Even using thier HTML 5 player in IE 9 (on the videos that run in it) I still have bad issues. Youtube is a mess, and at times it just seems like thier bandwidth is powered by a hampster in a wheel.

I have 25mbit fios also and YouTube is okay most of the time, buffers quickly even at 1080p video.  There have been periods in the past where it's been bad for a week or so though.  Like when the ISP moved us onto a new block of IPs, everything was really slow because of some overloaded router clogging up the pipes but it eventually got worked out.

Glad to know I'm not the only one. My 15mbit cable is very fast so I know it's not my ISP unless they're throttling YouTube for some reason.

@dentaku: I've had buffering problems lately, but only at 1080p.

What has annoyed me about Youtube for years now is that thing it occasionally does where it just stops loading at some random point, and the only way to get past that is to drag the scrubber a couple of seconds past that point, or completely refresh the page. I can't believe it still does that.

1 hour ago, Bas wrote

@dentaku: I've had buffering problems lately, but only at 1080p.

What has annoyed me about Youtube for years now is that thing it occasionally does where it just stops loading at some random point, and the only way to get past that is to drag the scrubber a couple of seconds past that point, or completely refresh the page. I can't believe it still does that.

At least YouTube's scrubber gives you a live video preview. Having an inactive scrubber was permissible back in the mid-1990s when Media Player was introduced, but it's 2011 now, and Media Player in Windows 7 still doesn't have an active scrubber, even though DirectShow and Media Foundation both support it.

Why Microsoft, why?!

So when is YouTube going to regress to using VP8?

YouTube has been horrible for me for a few months now. Videos play for 20 seconds and then stop to buffer. I have a 12Mbps connection so it's not my end.

I wonder if it's Comcast throttling bandwidth. Netflix streaming also occasionally stops during peak hours saying that my connection has slowed. Yet when downloading files I still get the same regular fast speed.

I am not a frequent user, so I don't know. But, it seems smooth from my experiences.

Seems to depend on the video I'm wanting to view and time of the day, if that plays into it. Now I have no clue how YouTube runs. I would guess its not just one gigantic server the size of the Seattle Space Needle. So could these server farms based on location to the specific video being playing have anything to do with it. For me the buffering issue has been going on for a few years and its worse in 720 or full screen. ?  

What platform does YouTube run on? 

38 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

What platform does YouTube run on? 

lighttpd & GNU/Linux

yeah it is slow lately. I have to wait on sd videos. And my school connection is super fast.

It's been pretty poor for me for a while now. Lots of buffering even in std res. Also, their flash player likes to go black (but still plays audio) under a number of circumstances usually related to going to/from full screen, something I don't ever see with other sites' players.

(EDIT:  Just read DCMonkey's post ... so I'm fixing mine ...) 

@DCMonkey:  I have the same problem when I go fullscreen on only one of my systems, 50% (or so) of the time the video doesn't render - just a black screen with audio.  I then just have to escape out of fullscreen, and go back to fullscreen and the video renders again.  It's very annoying.  I'm using IE9 RTW, but that can't be the sole problem because on other systems with IE9 RTW I don't have any problems.  I also only ever see this with YouTube.