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I have to use YouTube with an HTTPS connection, because YouTube is banned here (I need it for watching some specific videos from Stanford University). But it seems it uses an HTTP connection for loading videos from the server, so I get this error when I play videos:
An error occurred, please try again later
Isn't there a way for using an HTTPS connection for loading videos too?
(I have no idea why it is banned in my country; it is banned because it is. I hope you understand me.)
Firefox add-on SmartVideo for YouTube will do just that. You can even tell it to either start the video when you want. You can just open the link in a new tab, and just come back to it when you're ready to watch the vid. It has other useful options as well.
Edit: SmartVideo can be a bit buggy. As to 720p videos being buffered, I think it's because all videos in 720p (or higher? not sure) are already on WebM format. It's my default setting. It's the fastest video setting to load, faster than a 480p flv file.
Edit2: SmartVideo is also available for Google Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smartvideo-for-youtube/lnkdbjbjpnpjeciipoaflmpcddinpjjp?hl=en
I finally found a solution. It works in Google Chrome only and it requires two extensions.
Install the extensions Remove Scrollbars YouTube Options
Set Youtube Options to the fellowing settings:
Play a playlist in YouTube and go to the browser fullscreen mode by hitting the keyboard F11 button. This is important!
The transition of the video's are not fluently, but it stays fullscreen.
Best Answer
If you're on Firefox, you can try the Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS Everywhere extension.
It uses a customizable list of URL matches to hijack the browser's page-loading process and redirect to equivalent HTTPS URLs before the network request goes out. YouTube is included and enabled by default.
Otherwise, you may be out of luck. Chrome doesn't allow extensions to do that sort of thing and apparently Google is rolling out SSL gradually, so YouTube doesn't yet seem to have an equivalent to GMail's "always use SSL" option.
Video-loading may or may not be available via SSL, but HTTPS Everywhere generally gives you as much SSL as is possible without breaking the site. If that doesn't work, you may have to either use a VPN service or ask a friend in another country to download the video for you using something like Video DownloadHelper.