Basic Youtube Question

John Galt III

John Galt III

Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
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Oct 19, 2008
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In the past I was able (I think) to let a youtube video load into the player, sometimes for minutes, while showing itself in jerky and slow increments on the screen. I could then 'replay' the 'downloaded' video and see it play smoothly in its entirety. I think all I had to do was click on 'play' to do that. But now, when I click on 'play' the slow and jerky download starts all over again, it seems.



Maybe I am not seeing the option to click on, but I have not been able to recreate the same ability to play a video smoothly today. Are all the videos now non-savable? Or non-cacheable, whatever therm is ?



Do I have to change some setting ?



Thanks


P.S. Not asking how to improve the initial playing. That's another matter, which I think is caused by only having 2G RAM.
 
Last edited:
Are you asking if you can download videos from YouTube to play locally on your PC? I have never known it to work that way, and I would not expect that to be something that is easy to do.
 
Aerides said:
Are you asking if you can download videos from YouTube to play locally on your PC? I have never known it to work that way, and I would not expect that to be something that is easy to do.
Click to expand...


Real Player has had that capability for years.
 
I never tried to download a YouTube video. When I just tried, it said I needed to have YouTube "Premium". Is that something you have?

Maybe you had a free trial before and now that has expired?

As you can probably discern, I really don't know much about paid versions of Youtube.
 
Aerides said:
Are you asking if you can download videos from YouTube to play locally on your PC? I have never known it to work that way, and I would not expect that to be something that is easy to do.
Click to expand...

There are many apps that allow you to download YouTube videos including iTubeGo and 4K Video Downloader.

https://itubego.com/en63/
https://www.4kdownload.com/-53

I find it much easier to download the videos to my hard drive where I can organize them and watch on my TV (using a network media player) at my leisure. I delete them after watching, other than videos I think may be useful in the future (car repairs, computer instructions, etc.). Very similar to using a DVR for streaming or broadcast TV.
 
CRLLS said:
I never tried to download a YouTube video. When I just tried, it said I needed to have YouTube "Premium". Is that something you have?

Maybe you had a free trial before and now that has expired?

As you can probably discern, I really don't know much about paid versions of Youtube.
Click to expand...


If you are responding to my post, no. I just have Real Player that came with the computer I bought about 9 or 10 yrs ago. Also, the other poster is correct. There are other 3rd party utilities you can use to download Youtube stuff. I have no intention of paying for youtube premium.
 
Youtube has has changed its caching / buffering over the years. So, there's nothing you can change specific to youtube. It sounds like you're still dealing with that slow throughput issue, though.
 
I used to do the same thing. I can't replicate it now because my connection is fast and I have a lot of RAM. The only suggestion I have would be to start the video playing and then pause it and see if the bar continues filling in.
 
John Galt III said:
In the past I was able (I think) to let a youtube video load into the player, sometimes for minutes, while showing itself in jerky and slow increments on the screen. I could then 'replay' the 'downloaded' video and see it play smoothly in its entirety. I think all I had to do was click on 'play' to do that. But now, when I click on 'play' the slow and jerky download starts all over again, it seems.



Maybe I am not seeing the option to click on, but I have not been able to recreate the same ability to play a video smoothly today. Are all the videos now non-savable? Or non-cacheable, whatever therm is ?



Do I have to change some setting ?



Thanks


P.S. Not asking how to improve the initial playing. That's another matter, which I think is caused by only having 2G RAM.
Click to expand...

What browser are you using? Google Chrome? Microsoft Edge? Apple Safari?

What is your internet connection speed?

You might try to lower the video resolution of the YouTube videos. Click on the cogwheel or gear for the Settings and lower the resolution to 480p.
 
Believe it or not, I was able to save or 'cache' vidoes years ago while using 56K dialup, back in the good old days before adware and bloatware, etc added so many unneeded and unwanted bits to process.


It may not have been Youtube, actually. I do remember RealPlayer and MediaPlayer. Probably one of those. Clicking on pause would allow the video data to keep loading. In Youtube, clicking on pause just stops stops the download, as far as I can tell.


In any event I haven't been able to 'save' the video, even temporarily. No, I do not necessarily want to download to my hard drive, although it would be nice to know how to do that.


Connection speed has been ranging from 1.0 Meg to 34 Meg. Certain times of day better than others. I have a feeling the conn speed drops down to 1.0 Meg when playing youtube, though. I can check that. I signed into AOL.com (bloatfest) and my speed went from 34 Meg down to 0.4 Meg.



I have Firefox 115.x the most recent version that will work on WIndows 7.



I have tried to find videos that are already at a low resolution, like 480p, and also to change the resolution while playing, by using settings. I have gotten an acceptable, though jerky, result, but don't know exactly what I did to get there.
 
4 recommendations I would make to improve PC performance:

#1) Increase the 2GB of RAM to something larger -- I recently went from 4GB to 8GB

#2) Make sure that you hard drive is a Solid State Disk -- not a traditional drive with spinning platters.

#3) Ensure that you have enough free storage space on your drive (either SDD or HDD). Maybe no more than 75% full.

#4) Run a speed test on your interet connection by going to https://fiber.google.com/speedtest/. If you are using WIFI, you may be limited by your WIFI speeds vs your Internet Provider speeds.

Good Luck

-gauss
"written on a Dell Latitude e6410 circa 2011 laptop"
 
Last edited:
gauss said:
#4) Run a speed test on your interet connection by going to https://fiber.google.com/speedtest/. If you are using WIFI, you may be limited by your WIFI speeds vs your Internet Provider speeds.
Click to expand...
He has tested various times, usually 1 Mbps. I gave him a list of sites that can be used in the other thread, including that one. He is not using wifi. As mentioned, he doesn't even have a router, just a basic new cable modem connected directly to the old Windows 7 computer's integrated ethernet port.
 
mountainsoft said:
There are many apps that allow you to download YouTube videos including iTubeGo and 4K Video Downloader.

https://itubego.com/en63/
https://www.4kdownload.com/-53

I find it much easier to download the videos to my hard drive where I can organize them and watch on my TV (using a network media player) at my leisure. I delete them after watching, other than videos I think may be useful in the future (car repairs, computer instructions, etc.). Very similar to using a DVR for streaming or broadcast TV.
Click to expand...

The beauty of these download approaches is that they bypass injected commercials.

I use yt-dl in command line, both Mac and Linux and "harvest" the videos I want to view, commercial free. YouTube doesn't like people doing this so I end up rotating multiple VPNs to bypass YouTube throttling. This is prevalent on fiber connections (we have ATT fiber 1Gbit symmetric) and they will throttle you if they detect using a downloader.
 
Aerides said:
Are you asking if you can download videos from YouTube to play locally on your PC? I have never known it to work that way, and I would not expect that to be something that is easy to do.
Click to expand...

You can download the videos if you sign up for youtube premium. I don't but the price isn't terrible and you can share with others. My partner has it through her brother.
 
If you have YouTube Premium you can download videos.
 
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