YouTube Excessively Slow

What version of Safari are you running ?
What version of Flash are you running ?

Try updating both ...

Have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling flash? That has helped me in the past.
Steve

Checked all updates on Firefox and Safari, all up to date. Re-installed flash from Adobe website. No improvement in YouTube speed. Apple trailers load and play perfectly. YouTube videos still slow

+Still nothing firefox is slow as well+

It does this even if you're not running ANY other software right ?

Then I'd suspect your Internet connection and/or the path to the YouTube servers ... have you tried a trace to them to see if it highlights any dodgy routers ?

IVMichael, et al....
Thank for all the input and clues. 2135 hours here in AZ. Just got back from being out and about. And the speed problem with YouTube is gone. It appears that this is another weakness here in AZ of one of our local cable ISPs. Certain times of the day, some speed issues go down the toilet. I will test all night, and proceed. COX has been doing lots of work these days to improve their service. Last week a router blew and we had trouble in all of central and southern Arizona. So, I think they are learning as their customer base increases.

Onward and upward...

Hello All again,
Noontime here in Arizona, and yes YouTube is slow again... So, for me this appears to be a COX overload problem. Apple trailers are perfect, though. I'll keep in touch here, as I suspect there may be other problems/fixes associated with this.

All the best

Stu

This appears to be a problem with youtube and your mtu settings. Try this

1. Open a terminal window
2. Type ´sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 500´
3. Enter your password as required.
4. Close your browser connection to youtube and reopen it again.

I am also plauged by this issue. It seems alot of routers don´t like apple 😉

Speaking as an IP network engineer, I don't think this is necessarily sound advice. First of all, an MTU of 500 should not be necessary on any production network in 2009 (or any year in the past decade for that matter). Second, YouTube downloads would be in the direction of YouTube->YourMac. The MTU value of even passing interest in that case would be the one sitting on the YouTube server (and, for that matter, the MTU value of every interface of every router along your Internet path, all of which I assure you are 1500 or better). What is the basis for giving this advice?

You could always try [ClicktoFlash|http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master] which is a nice little tool to require you to click something for flash to load (good to prevent ads from loading) but also it runs youtube in H.264 video rather than flash by default.

I've had some interesting problems with this Click-to-Flash thing. While the concept is wonderful, I noticed a very significant degradation in performance when I actually did click on Flash that I wanted to see. In doing some packet capture on my machine, I can see that in many cases I'm somehow getting two copies of the same feed simultaneously. Even when I'm not, the sluggishness can be and almost always is extreme. A simple 30-second video might now require five or more minutes to buffer up sufficiently over a 1.5 Mbps DSL line. I just upgraded to 0.4 RC1 and we'll see if things improve...

Don't want to drive this too far OT, but just as a quick follow-up, after a few days of hoping against hope that .4 RC1 would solve all of my problems, I continued to need several minutes - sometimes approaching half an hour - just to buffer up low-res news clips of from one to five minutes. After removing Click-to-Flash I immediately began to experience expected performance for my given Internet connectivity. So I would advise caution wrt this promising little beta plug-in...