Youtube has been around for 15 years, yet no other video-centric website has the means to effectively compete with this gigantic platform. While Facebook likes to position IGTV to be competitive, much remains to be done before it becomes a viable option for most.
Improve YouTube’s buffering, performance, and speed
There are many video streaming websites, and YouTube is without a doubt the most used video website on this planet. But recently I started to have problems with YouTube buffering. I have a pretty decent connection, but still, YouTube was running slowly and videos take forever to buffer. It can be frustrating when you are trying to look at something really important. With the exception of YouTube, all the other streaming sites worked fine – for example, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc. So I decided to do some troubleshooting to see if I could fix this and improve YouTube’s buffering, performance, and speed.
How to speed up loading YouTube videos
Right now, YouTube is our best bet for content at the moment, so what do we do when videos on YouTube start buffering regularly?
In many cases, buffering and overall performance issues have nothing to do with the speed of your Internet connection. Sometimes the factors are very different, which is why we decided to discuss other issues to explain why your videos are having trouble loading.
This article explains several ways to reduce problems when watching YouTube videos. Try them all out to see which one works best for you.
- DNS DNS
- Change video quality
- Enable reservable bandwidth limit
- Firewall exceptions tip
Let’s see this situation in more detail.
1]DNS DNS
One of the best ways to improve buffering when streaming videos is to replace your DNS with the one offered by Google. Using this OpenDNS, in some cases, can be very helpful.
OK, so the first thing to do here is to visit the Control Panel, and to do that, you must first search for the Control Panel via the search box and move on from there. After opening the panel, select Network and Internet in the list and then click Network and Sharing Center.
Another way to get there is to right click on the Wireless icon connected on the Taskbar, then select Open network & The Internet settings. Now in the left pane click on Change adaptation parameters, then from there right click on one of the networks and make sure to double click Internet Protocol version 4 (TCP / IPv4).
Then find the section, use the following DNS server addresses and select it. From there, the following options should look like this:
- Preferred DNS server: 208.67.222.222
- Alternative DNS server: 208.67.220.220
Finally, click the OK button and restart the computer to see the changes each time you visit YouTube again.
2]Change video quality
Another way to improve performance on YouTube is to change the quality of the videos. For many, the default is 720p HD or 1080p HD. In some cases, the default can even be set to 4K. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, loading high quality videos may take some time.
To ensure better performance, simply decrease the video quality. 480p is nice because it retains a decent amount of quality, so it is observable and should load much faster than anything that comes before it.
3]Enable reservable bandwidth limit
Did you know that in some cases, Windows 10 will reserve part of your bandwidth for downloading updates, among others. It is important, it is true, but functionality is not defined in store because things can change.
In order to take full advantage of what your internet connection has to offer, we will need to disable this feature. We can do this by clicking on the search icon, then type gpedit.msc. Open this tool from the search results, then go immediately to:
LOCAL COMPUTER POLICY> COMPUTER CONFIGURATION> ADMINISTRATIVE TEMPELATES> NETWORK> QOS PACKET SHEDULER> BANDWITH RESERVABLE LIMIT.
From there, look for the option that says Limit bookable bandwidthand activate it immediately. After that, make sure to set the limit to 0, and then tap Apply > Okay. Finally, continue and restart your computer and test if YouTube loads the videos much faster than before.
4]Firewall exceptions tip
Some ISPs tend to limit the bandwidth of the server that caches videos, which has caused performance issues. The idea is to find the relevant IP range and block it via Widows firewall. Going this route should improve performance in some cases. Here’s how you can do it:
- Go to the Start menu and type CMD
- Then right-click and click Run as administrator
- Copy and paste the following command
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="TWCYouTubeFIX" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
You will now want to restart the computer before trying to see if everything is working accordingly. Also, if you want to delete the rule, type the following command in CMD:
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="TWCYouTubeFIX”
At least one of these options should allow YouTube videos to load faster, so we recommend trying them all to see which one works best.
Lily: How to open and edit videos using the YouTube video editor.
