I was recently surprised to learn that YouTube seems to have gone almost 100% HTML5. There was previously an option to opt-in to the HTML5 trial group, but this has now disappeared. Lately, every video I check is using HTML5. I've noticed a very slight decrease in CPU usage over Flash, at least on one of my machines. HTML5 used to be just as bad as Flash if not worse, but it has improved substantially since then.

I expect that the best YouTube performance will be obtained through Chrome, but I could be wrong about that.

YouTube's HTML5 player is causing all kinds of buffering problems for me, where it will buffer a good chunk of a video, then the buffer will suddenly be "forgotten", the video will stop as it re-buffers the stuff it forgot, then will continue playback. It's extremely annoying to have videos stop every 5 to 10 seconds to buffer in more data which it had already buffered... not to mention the sheer waste of bandwidth this represents; could be part of the reason why my connections to YouTube lately have been poor. :P

Using a somewhat older version of Firefox (v25.0) YouTube still runs its Flash player, which is how I can watch anything at all right now, but even then I'm getting poor throughput and sometimes connections are just flat-out stopping for several seconds to several minutes. It's been extremely difficult trying to figure out if the problem is YouTube itself, my ISP, or a combination of the two... I'm actually kind of leaning towards that last one since Blip is being affected for me too but not nearly to the same extent. x_x

I am having the exact same problem as you Gemini. I can not skip a video during playback because in 50% of cases it will break. It takes 5-10 seconds to buffer something (if you're lucky) or the video breaks.
I also thought that my ISP could be an issue, but every other video website works fine.

I heard that older versions of flash player (14, 15) work the best.

Youtube seems to glitch out here when I seek around it too much, maybe 5-6 seek operations and then it can got in fucked up mode and you just have to reload the page.

What happened with Youtube catching videos locally?
Now even when i press replay it reloads the entire video.

You can set the buffer size with YouTubeCenter. It might help.

My YouTube works 100%. I guess it depends on hardware. But it runs 1080 on my W510 and W520 notebooks.

PeterLI wrote:

My YouTube works 100%. I guess it depends on hardware.

I'm working with a 4 GHz 8-Core AMD system with 16 GB of RAM, over 400 GB of free HD space, a lightning-fast HD and a GeForce 660 GTX video card. If hardware was the cause then I'm proof 99.999% of everyone with a computer should be affected. :P

So much for HTML5 saving mankind.

Maybe you should test other browsers.

"fast" is always a bullshit marketing term when it comes to 'web innovation'

swaaye wrote:

So much for HTML5 saving mankind.

Maybe you should test other browsers.

Well, aside from the unlimited buffering and re-buffering going on, the HTML5 player does indeed work and does what it's supposed to, so it's probably just a bug YouTube needs to fix with how it buffers data. :P

I do recall the HTML5 player working perfectly fine a number of months ago.

I use Flashblock mostly because I don't want Youtube videos to autoplay. For a while it wasn't working very well, presumably because some videos would load up in the HTML5 player, but it works pretty consistently lately. I'm not sure it resolves the above-mentioned problems, though.

I was reading about something called GPU Accelerated Flash Player for Firefox, but didn't get around to trying it. Apparently it works by inserting another attribute into HTML video elements.
http://www.ghacks.net/2014/09/24/gpu-accelera … nce-in-firefox/

And of course there's Gnash, but I have no idea if that's good for anything these days.

I am using Flash Player 11.4 in Opera and Firefox. It is 9.3 MB, considerably less than the latest version. To use this version in Firefox I had to set 'extensions.blocklist.enabled' to false. Its built-in GPU acceleration cuts CPU usage approximately in half. Composing the webpage and overlaying stuff like the play icon on top of the video are inherently slow processes, which is where CPU is being used.

For me Flash has always been reasonably stable. The alternate "HTML5" player is quite twitchy in comparison. It or maybe the browser it is being executed in is very sensitive to load on the computer. If I do something in Windows or mouse over something on the page, video and sound would jerk. "HTML5" as a replacement doesn't bring any benefits as far as I can see, and is just change for the sake of change to make computers and browsers obsolete, because the video does not bypass the monstrosity that is a JavaScript-enabled webpage as I was lead to believe.

To watch YouTube I use SMPlayer. It doesn't have any hardware acceleration, apart from chroma upsampling that is in every player, but still works faster than a webpage. It has a configurable buffer in RAM. (It is not large enough to cache whole videos.) In Opera, I have integrated SMPlayer in the rightclick menu by editing standard_menu.ini. When I browse to a YouTube page, I can right-click on it, and launch the player without copying the URL manually. This of course only works for YouTube, and not other video or sound sharing sites. SMPlayer can be launched like that for direct HTTP video links too.

I can post some instructions on how to do it if you have Opera. The My Opera page where they were posted has since been taken down.

I haven't used SMPlayer in a long time. If it works as well as you say, I wouldn't mind having to manually copy the URL.

j7n wrote:

"HTML5" as a replacement doesn't bring any benefits as far as I can see, and is just change for the sake of change to make computers and browsers obsolete, because the video does not bypass the monstrosity that is a JavaScript-enabled webpage as I was lead to believe.

The alternative is to remain forever dependent on the closed-source Flash plugin, which seems to be constantly riddled with security problems and doesn't seem likely to make a smooth transition to 64-bit.

There used to be a plugin that would make Flash video play in Windows Media Player, but it never worked particularly well and I think development ceased entirely.

I think VLC might have GPU acceleration (DXVA) on Vista+, but I have not tried it. SMPlayer will work as long as the developer keeps it updated as Google make their changes. There is handy menu item under Help for downloading an update to "YouTube code", without reinstalling the player. It takes only a few seconds.

I have set SMPlayer to run at Above Normal priority and can use remaining CPU time to browse the extremely slow YouTube page and read comments, and the video doesn't interrupt.

In Opera 12, Opera 19 (Opium), Firefox 22, 27, I do get to use the Flash plugin. YouTube briefly served the HTML5 version to Chrome/Chromium last summer. I've not seen it happening since.

A truly "open" video standard for the web should allow the browser to receive a video stream and play it efficiently using fully native code, like a video player does, without any html or javascript, without any menus or controls provided by the site.

I don't see how you can simultaneously have a "standard" and "fully native code".

SMPlayer has a built-in, fast YouTube browser. Sadly, SMPlayer doesn't support 1080p due to DASH playback.

I was having the same problem when skipping ahead in youtube videos. I just bought a new router and so far its been ok... really weird.

Firtasik wrote:

You can set the buffer size with YouTubeCenter. It might help.

Wow... I had no idea this existed. Thanks for mentioning it.

Youtube is so broken for me nowadays that I think at least half the time I try to play a video, I have to reload. First I'll get some distorted garbage at the bottom of the video and no sound. Reload. Other times the video will play for about 10 seconds, then that stupid "auto" quality setting will try to switch resolutions, dump the buffer, and freeze permanently. Reload.
For some reason, the youtube settings after all these years still don't let you pick a specific preferred resolution.
The buffering changes suck - I used to be able to prebuffer multiple tabs of entire videos before watching them, so there was no concern about my internet keeping up in real-time. I was able to do this for at least a year after other people said it wasn't possible. Then one day my luck ran out. Somebody at Youtube "fixed" me.
Now they only let you buffer about 50 seconds, which isn't worth much if my internet is going slow.
I've worked around all these playback issues by downloading everything to my hard drive before watching, but that's tedious for things I have no desire to watch more than once.

So, I've just installed that Youtube Center plugin. It looks nice so far, although strangely the buffer size is the one option that is missing. It's in the online instructions, but the option isn't actually there. I did disable "DASH", which I never heard of before now but it sounds like my nemesis.
It seems this was sufficient - I'm testing it right now, and it buffered an 8 minute video without stopping. Hooray - youtube might be usable again!