Tweaking YouTube playback and pre-cache

Question

Is there any way to tweak the YouTube client caching feature?

I have this weird issue where some of the videos will have huge latency. It takes ages before the video starts caching. Now this becomes completely fatal, because the video will cache 10 seconds of playback, then stop (cause that should be enough, right?), but since the latency is bigger than 10 seconds it will get stuck. It's soo incredibly anoying and only happens with some videos.

Is it possible to somehow force the client to pre-cache the entire video?

P.S. This problem persists across operating systems and browsers. My connection is 120/10Mbit, with very low latency across the entire world.

Answer 1

Video latency would no longer be an issue for you, no matter how long it takes your videos to start caching, if you could tell YouTube to cache your video and keep on caching it until it had cached the entire video in your computer. The way to do this is to enable the YouTube HTML5 Video Player which you can do here.

As a consequence of buffering the whole video you may also need to increase the size of your browser memory cache to something like 256MB or even 512MB, depending on the amount of available RAM in your system. You can increase the size of the memory cache in Firefox by typing about:config in the Firefox URL address bar and then find the entry for browser.cache.memory.max_entry_size and change the size to a larger number. You need to right-click on the entry in order change it. The entry for browser.cache.memory.enable should remain at its default setting which is true. Finally, it is not strictly necessary to change the size of the browser memory cache, but if you don't do it you may find that YouTube caches only half of the video and then stops and gets completely stuck halfway through the playback, when what you really want YouTube to do is to play your video smoothly all the way through without a break.