Youtube - certain videos won't load

[The Peeps]

Ok here's one for you... for the last couple of days I have been unable to play certain videos on youtube. It seems to be completely random which videos don't work and it's only maybe 1 out of 10 that won't load. Some completely fail to load/buffer from the start but I can still see the preview frames if I hover along the track bar. Some load a little bit and play for a few seconds before the same issue occurs but most videos work absolutely fine.

 

It's not limited to just one browser or even one device. I've tried the same videos from my mobile and they won't work either which leads me to believe it's some kind of network issue but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Other people can load the videos fine so it must be on my end, right?

 

I've reset my router/modem and cleared my browser of everything etc. Any ideas of what to do? The only thing I've found online that's similar to what's happening to me is this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/983930 but no solution was found, the guy just said it randomly started working again a day after posting.

 

Nothing has changed in my home network to cause this so I am completely stuck. Please help!

[Rummy]

Whose your ISP? VM by any chance? I recall having problems with something silly once(an another time with certain imageshack images) and I think it turned out to actually be a problem after my router rather than before. Not that that helps at all.

 

How do cmd tracerts or pathpings work out? Not that I know a lot about properly interpreting them if there's more, but I ended up trying/being told to to do them and saw certain hangs/dropouts at a specific point along the way.

 

EDIT: If VM, I've come across this reddit with a bit of googling videos and pathping -

Edited September 5, 2014 by Rummy

[The Peeps]

How do cmd tracerts or pathpings work out? Not that I know a lot about properly interpreting them if there's more, but I ended up trying/being told to to do them and saw certain hangs/dropouts at a specific point along the way.

 

EDIT: If VM, I've come across this reddit with a bit of googling videos and pathping -

 

Yeah I'm with VM. I don't know what cmd tracerts or pathpings are :p

 

Thank you so much for that reddit thread. I tried one of the solutions and it worked instantly :heart:

 

Apparently Virgin Media caches youtube and sends you to their proxy so they can throttle the downloads but their own servers can't handle it for all areas. So I guess I'm in a viewership-heavy area for youtube on VM. Still not really sure why it only affected certain videos :p but at least it's fixed now.

[Rummy]

Had a hunch it might be them. They're bloody good on the whole, just some weird things come up sometimes.

 

 

Ah just for future reference - run cmd(command line) then just type 'pathping <ip address or website address here>. It essentially then traces the IP packets whilst also pinging each one, and you can see if/where there might be a problem of sorts. tracert(trace route) essentially does the same but doesn't ping each address, it traces the traffic. ping is just...well, it'll ping an address. pathping is sort of a combination of the two, and tbh I'm not sure why you wouldn't use it over the others except for a time benefit.

 

Which has probably not helped/made any sense at all. I'm not sure I totally get it either.

[The Peeps]

No, that does make sense. I know I have heard of pinging now you've explained it :p

 

[edit] seems it was only a temporary fix. VirginMedia are really fucking it up here. Apparently a lot of people are having this issue at the moment, I can only hope VM actually get on and fix it.

Edited September 6, 2014 by The Peeps

[Rummy]

No, that does make sense. I know I have heard of pinging now you've explained it :p

 

[edit] seems it was only a temporary fix. VirginMedia are really fucking it up here. Apparently a lot of people are having this issue at the moment, I can only hope VM actually get on and fix it.

 

I'd hazard a suspicion that if it's VM they'll try to work around people working around. I'd wonder if some sort of proxy might help/work, but I've got no clue of the real issue/problem to get around that.

[The Peeps]

Using a proxy works perfectly. This has been raised in their forum now and there are 50+ pages worth of people posting up their details so VM can fix it. It's been a week now though which is ridiculous!