Youtube – prevent ‘Video paused’ message in YouTube

It seems to be on a video by video basis. Your 'create a spaceship' tutorial will buffer when paused, but your 'create a city' tutorial will not.

They seem to use slightly different players; based on the right-click menus. The spaceship tutorial mentions HTML5 and the city tutorial has the standard Flash menu.

You could try forcing the use of a different media player or you could try joining Youtube's HTML5 trial; the 'create a city' tutorial buffers fine when played using the HTML5 player.

https://www.youtube.com/html5

Edit to include solution by Andrew Price:

1. Login in to your YouTube account
2. In 'Settings' go to the 'Playback' menu
3. Under 'Video Playback Quality' check the 'I have a slow connection' option

This will default video output to 360p, but you can manually alter this when playing the video. Even at higher definitions the video will continue to buffer.

YouTube may be throttling its own videos. I can load all their front page material just fine. If I try to load a less viewed video and run it concurrently with a number of front page videos, the front page videos will stream perfectly and the unpopular barely viewed video will stutter and stop while continuing to buffer.