• The web browser and the flash plugin should be up to date. Youtube uses Adobe’s Flash technology to stream the videos. There is unfortunately no official option to switch to a different technology like Apple’s Quicktime or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. (Websites like Gametrailers.com offer this for example, read on to find out how to do this).
• The computer itself has to be capable of playing the Youtube videos. Nothing can be done if the cpu or Internet connection is not fast enough to play the new 1080p videos. A switch to a lower resolution will do the trick in those situations. It might also be a good idea to open a performance monitor (or a task manager) to see if the cpu, memory or hard disk activity raises to critical levels during Youtube video playback. You can also check if it is related to your computer’s performance by downloading the video and playing it locally.

But lets say the computer and the Internet connection are fast enough and that the web browser, Flash plugin and audio and video drivers are also up to date. What if Youtube videos still stutter during playback? The best option here is to find out if it is web browser related. This can be done easily by downloading and testing Youtube video playback with other web browsers. Suggested browsers are Google’s Chome browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Opera.

The test can either lead to the conclusion that Youtube video playback is broken in all web browsers, in some or just in the one web browser that happens to be the default web browser that the user likes to use. The first conclusion seems to suggest either a hardware problem or Flash plugin problem while the last suggests a problem with the single web browser.

Here are a few solutions that have been posted by users around the web (remember to restart Firefox after making those changes).

• Firefox Session Restore: The Firefox web browser will save sessions every ten seconds. This is a great way to save data automatically in case the web browser crashes. If Firefox does not crash regularly then there is not a need to save sessions every ten seconds as this can also be one of the reasons why Youtube videos stutter in Firefox. The fix is simple: Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar, filter for the term browser.sessionstore.interval, double-click that term and enter a new time for the session restore interval. The time has to be entered in milliseconds and a session store interval of 120000 or higher is recommended
• Moving the disk cache to another hard drive or location: This can usually be done in any web browser. The idea is to move the disk cache, that is a temporary storage of data on the hard drive, to another faster drive. The disk cache is usually on the same drive as the operating system. If the computer has more than one drive it might be a good idea to move the cache to the second drive. Firefox users need to add the parameter in about:config by right-clicking, selecting Add, pasting the value browser.cache.disk.parent_directory and entering a location on the local computer system, e.g. d:\cache\ in the second form.
• Disable hardware accelerator for Flash videos. This can be done by right-clicking a Youtube video, selecting Settings, switching to the Display tab (leftmost icon) and unchecking Enable Hardware Acceleration in the menu.
• Try playing Youtube videos in their own web browser window without additional tabs open.
• Increase the memory cache of the web browser. Open about:config, enter browser.cache.memory.capacity in the filter and change the default value to a higher memory cache capacity, e.g. 96000 (which would be 96 Megabytes).
• Open the global Flash settings here and to set “always deny” in global security settings, and to set to unlimited in both ’storage’ tabs. A restart is required. (Thanks Charlie M)
• Replace the Youtube Flash player with the default video processor of the computer system. This can be done using the Greasemonkey script No Flash Player. This can be the perfect solution for many users who only have problems with Adobe Flash and Youtube videos. This does however remove some of the controls like showing the code to embed Youtube videos in other websites.

Workarounds if the above solutions to play Youtube videos without pauses did not help:

• The Play and Pause trick: Hit the pause button once the Youtube video starts playing. The web browser will continue caching the video. Start playback again once the video caching has reached a comfortable lead.
• Download the Youtube videos: This is not a very comfortable solution and maybe not even practicable if many Youtube videos are watched throughout the day. It can however be the solution for individual Youtube videos that do not play normally on the site.
• Switch to another web browser for Youtube. If you discovered that another web browser does not have the playback problems when playing videos on Youtube you might want to consider switching to that web browser for playing Youtube videos.
• You could also try the Firefox add-on Media Player Connectivity which makes it possible to play Youtube videos in a separate media player that is installed on the computer system.

One of these suggestions and fixes hopefully helped fix Youtube video playback problems. If you know of another fix for this problem let us know in the comments. We would like to add it then to the article to make it a comprehensive resource for fixing Youtube playback problems. We would also like to hear from you if one of the fixes did solve your video playback problems.

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Tubequeue – as the name suggests – is of the latter sort. It is a standalone software program for the Windows operating system that can not only download multiple videos from Youtube but also convert them into different formats so that the videos can be transferred to other devices such as mobile phones, mp3 players or gaming consoles.

The program works the following way: The user begins by entering a search phrase in the search box at the top left corner of the program. This will display 100 Youtube videos related to that search query. It is possible to sort the results by relevancy, data added, popularity or view count just like on the Youtube website. The Youtube videos are displayed with a small image thumbnail, names, ratings and playing time. A click on the right arrow key will open the selected Youtube video in a preview window where it can be watched. The second possibility to find Youtube videos is to use the Youtube website search instead which will basically display the Youtube website in the program window.

A right-click on one or multiple videos in the list makes it possible to add the selected videos to the processing queue. This will move these videos to the conversion settings pane where the user can select an output format. Formats offered included avi, mp4, mov, mp3 or mpeg with the option to keep the original flv format.

A click on the Add To Processing Queue button will move the videos once again. This time to the processing queue where all information and settings that have been selected so far are shown again. A click on Download / Convert will start the Youtube video download and conversion process.

It is possible to add Youtube urls and video formats that already reside on the local computer system to the queue as well. TubeQueue is an interesting software program to download and convert multiple Youtube videos in short time. It has some performance problems during video playback and does not cope well with videos that are not available in the user’s country. It is a rock solid program otherwise though. TubeQueue requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

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24 drives equals a total storage of 6 Terabytes. The other system specs are as impressive. They added a combination of two Intel 3.2GHz QX9775 Quad-Core cpus, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, 4GB of 800MHz FB-DIMM DDR2 SDRAM, two Corsair HX1000W power supply units, an Adaptec 5 Series RAID card, an Areca 1680ix-24 RAID card and of course the 24 256GB MLC Solid State Drives.

How fast was the system after all? They managed to top 2 Gigabytes of sequential write and reading speed. They performed some tests like loading all Microsoft Office applications (in 0.5 seconds), all 53 apps of the Windows start menu (in 18.09 seconds), copying a 700 Megabyte DVD rip (0.8 seconds) or recycling 700 files with a total size of 5.6 Gigabytes (instantly).

The viral marketing campaign is highly successful with more than 250K views on Youtube already. Can you imaging running a system like this? What are your thoughts, let us know!

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Youtube HQ is a Greasemonkey script that takes that burden away from the user. The script can be configured in two ways: The first mode which is also the default one will always display the video in the highest possible quality on the Youtube website. It will automatically increase the screen size to fit the video on the screen. This makes only sense if the computer is connected to a computer monitor that is capable of displaying the high resolutions.

The second mode of the Greasemonkey script will always load the low quality version of the Youtube video which is excellent for users who are accessing Youtube with a low bandwidth connection or from a system with a small computer monitor.

The benefit of using the Greasemonkey script is obvious. It will automatically resize Youtube videos according to the user’s configuration of the script. Check out out article Youtube Video Download to find out how to download videos from Youtube.

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Youtube video download adds two links to one of the right panels that contain the url and embed links. The Download as MP4 and Download as 720p HD MP4 are displayed. They can be saved by right-clicking on one of the two links and selecting Save Link As from the context menu. One should note however that this is obviously only working if a HD video is available on Youtube. If there is no HD video the download will display the file as get_video or videoplayback which will not save the video at all. It is possible that one of the two Youtube video download links is working but there have been cases where none was working.

The Firefox add-on to download Youtube videos in high definition is currently experimental which means that you have to log into the Mozilla website to download and install the extension.

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