YouTube used to work just fine for me. I could stream videos in 1080p HD with no problems or buffering. Now, for the past few weeks/months I haven't had even close to that experience. Only 480p and lower will actually play without much buffering. 720p will load slowly, and often with buffering. 1080p is almost out of the question now.
I've tried:
- Chrome and IE9 with the same results.
- Clearing my cookies in Chrome
- Turning off the HTML5 player and going back to the flash player
- Other PC's on my network, with similar results
What's weird is that it isn't a connection issue at all. My fiance regularly streams Netflix and Hulu+ in HD. When I run Speedtest.net, I get ~20MB Down, ~4MB up. I have no lag or issues playing hours of online gaming. I have no issues with other HD video streaming sites—for instance, I can stream twitch.tv at full resolution with no problem. This video on Vimeo loads immediately, and plays smoothly in HD from beginning to end.
What gives? Is my ISP throttling YouTube? Is my router mysteriously refusing packets from YouTube? How can I find out?
Best Answer
Open up your terminal and run these commands (you may be prompted for the admin password):
This was taken from this post.
His assumptions were not verified but what he found was helpful for a lot of people.
TL;DR: This will most likely block Google's data centers for online video forcing YouTube and other sources to look for a cached source (potentially less bogged down and perhaps a fewer number of hops).