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When you start a YouTube video, there's a light grey bar which indicates the loading of the video. When I replay the video (by clicking the 'replay' button or by clicking somewhere random on the horizontal play line), why does the video load/buffer again?

It never used to be like this, but recently I've noticed that for some videos this problem occurs. Does anyone else experience this?

I tried on both Chrome and Firefox in Windows 7.

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  • Does this happen irrespective of browser used? If so, YouTube might have changed something at their end.
    – Karan
    May 24, 2013 at 20:52
  • i tried on chrome as well as firefox
    – AutoMEta
    May 24, 2013 at 21:00
  • Yes, this is normal. The grey bar indicates that buffering is in progress. It's the same thing for me. But you will notice that the buffering is faster the second time you play the video. Also, even if you skip forward or backwards, the picture and sound comes on almost instantaneously. I'm not sure how it was before, but this is how it is now, and we better applaud Google for delivering galactic amounts of video material each Earthly day, than bashing YouTube for buffering too much or too slow or whatever.
    – Samir
    May 24, 2013 at 22:11
  • 3
    I believe that you can avoid this by using YouTube HTML5, youtube.com/html5
    – user35263
    May 25, 2013 at 9:06
  • Closers: This will be a duplicate if it's migrated. Please simply close it as OT.
    – rtf
    May 25, 2013 at 19:02

2 Answers 2

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If you have a slow Internet connection I suggest you open the page of the video you want to watch, and when it starts to play you click the pause button. Then wait for the grey bar to reach the right end. Then you play the video.

If you experience that the grey bar gets stuck while the video is paused, try playing the video for a few seconds and then pause it again. This will make it start buffering again.

Sometimes it also helps to play and skip forward close to the end of the grey bar. This has the effect of speeding up the buffering sometimes. When the grey bar reaches the end you can skip back to the start and play the video.

This kind of play-and-pause approach is not for watching the video. It's only used to make sure the whole video is buffered.

Also, after watching the full length of the video, don't click to replay it. You just saw it! There's no point in watching it again. It will save you some bandwidth and maybe even Internet cost, and you can go do something else or watch a another video.

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  • I know this doesn't answer the "why" part. But at least you now have the "how" part of it. I just thought I would at least try to give you some tips on how to better use YouTube.
    – Samir
    May 24, 2013 at 22:26
  • The reason for its reloading again is that if you have fast forward the video then it wont be buffer properly so in the case of reloading the same it would be again buffer the video before playing
    – BDRSuite
    Dec 11, 2014 at 19:51
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Unlike Adobe Flash Player, the YouTube HTML5 Player buffers the entire video while it is playing, so there is no stuttering and you can search anywhere in the timeline of the buffered part of the video.

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  • I tried your solution but still the problem persists. I use Chrome (Version 28.0.1500.71 m) and after joining the HTML5 trial I restarted the browser. In the link above it says that "You are currently in the HTML5 trial". Any Ideas would be much appreciated! Thanks.
    – p8me
    Jul 12, 2013 at 0:30
  • Do you also have Firefox installed on your system? Firefox uses Adobe Flash Player for playing Flash videos. Chrome uses its own built-in Flash player.
    – karel
    Jul 12, 2013 at 4:41
  • Thanks for your reply. I just installed Firefox, joined HTML5 trial, restated Firefox. But no difference yet, the video reloads after each replay or clicking/moving progress bar. I also tried different resolutions/videos. That's weird!
    – p8me
    Jul 12, 2013 at 13:01
  • If you've got enough RAM (4GB or else your desktop performance and stability will suffer) you can try increasing the size of the Firefox memory cache for an individual entry to 512MB. Type about:config in the Firefox URL search box and change the Value for browser.cache.memory.max_entry_size to 512000. Please post a comment if this doesn't work.
    – karel
    Jul 12, 2013 at 13:13
  • I have made the changes, restarted Firefox, double checked the changes, but still the same! Maybe there is another problem with my Computer, I am going to try it on other computers. I have Win8, and 8Gb RAM. Thanks for your help!
    – p8me
    Jul 13, 2013 at 15:06

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