Potential fix for Youtube streaming courtesy of Reddit (worked for me for Mweb & OW)

I must say this does seem to work for me.

I don't really have YT issues on my TI 4Mbps connection, but can not always watch in 720p or 1080p without some stuttering. Obviously I can at times.

I've loaded a couple of YT videos and found that that the grey buffering line that precedes the red line almost runs away from the red line and out of about 7 videos had no buffering issues.

Unfortunately I did not think to test before I ran the command and I'm to lazy atm to remove the command an test again without it, so my info is not that trustworthy. I might have just been lucky with the videos I chose.

Hopefully it will help the guys that do have trouble streaming YT videos.

Thx
:)

Edit:

Could watch this in 720p with no buffering, but 1080p did buffer a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONdEkDT5ky8
 
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I do not think you should block such a huge IP ranges.

I would rather try a host file hack. Rather point Youtube to a SA IP compared to blocking the IP ranges.
 
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McGuywer said:
I do not think you should block such a huge IP range.

I would rather try a host file hack. Rather point Youtube to the SA IP compared to blocking to IP ranges.
Click to expand...

Or just write a bat file to enable and disable the firewall rule.

Here you go:

Create Rule
Code: 
@echo off
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="YouTube" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
pause

Enable Rule:
Code: 
@echo off
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="YouTube" new enable=yes
pause

Disable Rule:
Code: 
@echo off
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="YouTube" new enable=no
pause

Save the above as 3 .bat files and run them as administrator when required.
 
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grim, your still blocking 173.194.55.* and 206.111.*.*
Another icon on the Desktop, thank you but not for me.

Rather take a look at Pada's excellent thread.
 
McGuywer said:
grim, your still blocking 173.194.55.* and 206.111.*.*
Another icon on the Desktop, thank you but not for me.

Rather take a look at Pada's excellent thread.
Click to expand...

The whole point of this rule is to bypass using local cache servers as some ISPs rate limit the traffic on their caching servers and this is also why you don't see YouTube videos buffering completely when you pause them anymore as the ISPs prevent this from happening as it eats bandwidth.

I haven't been able to test this myself as I'm away on business, I should be home later today and will test it then on my ADSL line
 
grim said:
The whole point of this rule is to bypass using local cache servers as some ISPs rate limit the traffic on their caching servers and this is also why you don't see YouTube videos buffering completely when you pause them anymore as the ISPs prevent this from happening as it eats bandwidth.

I haven't been able to test this myself as I'm away on business, I should be home later today and will test it then on my ADSL line
Click to expand...

Fair point.

Please provide feedback when have the time.
 
grim said:
The whole point of this rule is to bypass using local cache servers as some ISPs rate limit the traffic on their caching servers and this is also why you don't see YouTube videos buffering completely when you pause them anymore as the ISPs prevent this from happening as it eats bandwidth.
Click to expand...
Actually, it is not the ISPs that prevent the whole video from caching, it is the actual youtube player that does this, a change made by google, not the isps. When I switch over to the HTML5 player I don't have the same problem anymore, yet it loads from the same google cache servers. I don't see why ISPs would rate limit their own Google Cache servers, it just doesn't make sense.

Anything on your own network is fair game, however expensive transit links on the other side...those will most definitely get shaped and limited to keep quality over speed.
 
just tryed it it worked
well only tested 1 vid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsUPixwMDg0

1mbps and 480p plays good never know it can play that well on 1mbps hope it stays that way

thank you :D

cant w8 till i get my 2mbps internet :D
then maby just maby 720p will work :P

edit: spoke to soon :/
 
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How would I use this method in my router?

Is there a way to do this on the router side?
 
Why all these klugy hacks. Just use your ISPs DNS servers (as negotiated by the router's PPPoE session) so you get re-directed to their local caches.

For instance on Mweb 99% of all my Youtube videos come off their local 197.81.*.* Google caches. All 720p & almost all 1080p videos view without buffering on 4Mbps.

Use TCPview to check which IPs your streams are actually coming from and traceroute to them to see if local or abroad.
 
This is a terrible idea! :sick:

Firstly - you are firewalling yourself from at least 60 000 servers that have nothing to do with YouTube. There is no telling what other services you might break on the process.

Secondly - none of those IPs are local to us. They have no relevance for any YouTube user in South Africa.

And lastly - if you are seeing poor performance its probably due to either the local caches being slow due to the Seacom outage or the local caches completely failing due to the Seacom outage. In the US there are plenty of caches around to failover to. In ZA you will most likely get redirected to caches in Europe and due to the massive latency you will always get poor performance.
 
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Huh. It actually works.

A minor refinement:

Block 173.194.5.135 outgoing traffic on port 80 (destination port).

Thats a google address. Pinging it reveals a 200ms ping, which suggests that it is indeed not pulling the data off the local ggc. Weird.

Once I blocked that, it pulled the traffic off 196.23.168.141, which is a local server....and IS server specifically.

So the claim that it improves YT is very plausible...traffic should be much smoother if using local servers.

EDIT: Might be different IPs for others.

Roman4604 said:
Why all these klugy hacks. Just use your ISPs DNS servers (as negotiated by the router's PPPoE session) so you get re-directed to their local caches.
Click to expand...
Why would this depend on the DNS server? Surely one DNS server would resolve a given URL to the same IP as any other? DNS is supposed to be globally consistent after all. I'd imagine something like anycast is used to achieve the regional balancing effect.
 
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hmmm...doesn't work anymore once you opt into html5. I guess the local servers don't support it yet.
 
HavocXphere said:
Why would this depend on the DNS server?
Click to expand...
Cause thats how CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) work.

HavocXphere said:
Surely one DNS server would resolve a given URL to the same IP as any other?
Click to expand...
No, the DNS servers end-users use are only caching servers, they always need to request the proper resolution (if not already cached) from the authoritative DNS servers.

CDN authoritative servers are highly intelligent, aware of geolocation, ISP network ranges (ASNs) and other load factors and will tailor their responses based on best efficiency. So when an Mweb caching DNS server requests the IP of a content server from Google, it will be directed to Mweb's local cache, being the closest & most efficient.

HavocXphere said:
DNS is supposed to be globally consistent after all.
Click to expand...
No, not these days with most of the world's popular content being distributed on CDNs.
 
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