YouTube totally broken now
 

This evening I can't watch anything on YouTube. Nothing starts to play. If I hop on to a VPN it's fine, but direct through Virgin it's completely broken.

Anyone else getting this? At least one other person on the Virgin forum is complaining about it, not that VM care.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

getting the same thing, will load after a min or so, but no where near as fast and if u try to fast forward it's back to square one

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

No problems whatsoever.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Youtube has been flakier than usual the past couple of days. Weirdly enough, just changing browsers seems to "fix" it but then that browser will suddenly stop so I'll change back and it'll start working again.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

whatever it was, seems to have gone now

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

presumably outside peak time, try in and out peak times and see if there is a major difference

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

The VM youtube saga part two is taking just as long to resolve as part one. Scandalous really as there was only a couple of months that have been trouble free in the last half a year.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

More complaints to Watchdog then.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

i get random issues but all seem ok now

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

No problems streaming 1080p whatsoever.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Down again. VPN is fine, it's just Virgin's CDN.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

but are you surprised it only lasted 2 months?

consider their approach to fixing congestion, to add "just enough" capacity to stop it been noticeable but knowing full well it will be back in a few months, why would we think they took a different approach the youtube problem.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Hasn't been too bad this week but I guess it's no great co-incidence that everything was very flaky over the school holidays.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

screwed up here again, only seems to be during peak too

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Same here, after the goggle merger to central account my whole youtube was unusable. I had select the option to separate the youtube acc from the goggle central acc to make it work properly. So I've done this work great on the pc but go to my media streaming box, click on youtube; goes in ...load then starts to cancel out the menu functions then none to a blank image screen - not a thing. Youtube has screw up again, was ok before the upgrade ! :rolleyes:

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

After 4-5pm, YouTube stops working for me.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Try this then and see if it helps. You can edit your windows hosts file to block Virgins CDN. Here is a copy of the alterations I've made to mine below, before you try this though, make sure you BACKUP YOUR CURRENT FILE!!!! just in case.

Hosts file location is C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc

Edit the file using Notepad, but if you don't know what you are doing leave it alone......

Add the following lines to the bottom of your existing file.

127.0.0.1 62.252.170.140
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.141
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.142
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.143
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.144
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.145
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.146
127.0.0.1 62.252.170.147
127.0.0.1 62.252.44.12
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.75
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.76
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.77
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.78
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.79
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.80
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.81
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.82
127.0.0.1 62.253.3.83
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.0
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.1
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.2
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.3
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.4
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.5
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.6
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.7
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.8
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.9
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.10
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.11
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.12
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.13
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.14
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.15
127.0.0.1 62.252.0.16

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

...or just block ntli.net

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

How is this done? ;)

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

however you want

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

He's asking what do you set where in the SH.

---------- Post added at 15:53 ---------- Previous post was at 15:48 ----------

I don't think it can be done in the SH. It's a standard function (blocking URLS) of most third party routers if you're in modem mode.

It can also be done in your PC's firewall (I always keep SH firewall off).

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

127.0.0.1 ntli.net

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

You already probably know this but I did get a call from the CEOs office today and they confirmed that they are aware of the YouTube problem affecting a "small" amount of customers and are trying to fix it...

They couldn't comment on a fix date however.

Guess it's just wait and see!

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

They always say it affects only a small amount of customers :LOL:

Even if affected every customer who attempts to watch a youtube video had problems, wordplay could say that is a small amount as only 15% of customers may watch youtube vids ;)

Very bad for a big ISP like virgin to take so long to resolve a problem this big and even worse this happened not that long ago too, which also took months to resolve.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Yup, what really annoys me is loading a Youtube video and it not even starting for at least 30 secs. Then when it does start it constantly buffers...

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Then make the alterations I mentioned above and make your pain vanish, or put up with your buffering videos, you're choice.... :rolleyes:

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

A better option would be for Virgin to fix the problem.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I had no problem downloading 2.4GB of video in under 1 hour

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I'd like to think so, that comes to about 700Kb/s or somewhere in the region of 6Meg.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Do you think I would have posted if I had not tried that? :rolleyes:

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

YouTube has been broken for ages on VM. In the last couple of days I have had videos that just won't start to play, videos that play and then just stop mid-way through, and videos that play fine, but if I seek forwards, they never resume playing.

They've been "aware of the issue" for months. I wouldn't listen to any of the crap they come out with. Working on the VM forums has got to be the most soul destroying job in the world, listening to complaint after complaint and knowing that the fix date you're posting is likely to come and go without the issue being fixed.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

What result do you get with this link? (as posted by craigj)

http://redirector.c.youtube.com/report_mapping

Mine is this (My IP) => lhr07s13

Do you have any other jitter issues with your connection then or not?

---------- Post added at 17:18 ---------- Previous post was at 17:17 ----------

Never thought of that one......

:D

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Adding my voice to the realm of the dis-satisfied here.

Youtube videos were ok until last night, now most just play a minute or two, then lock up.

But over a VPN, they work fine. That seems to suggest that its definitely VM related.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I will point out youtube have made some changes in the last few weeks, which seems to have broken their site somewhat.

First of all if you use the auto bitrate option, its buggy full stop. eg if try to skip forwards on auto it often then sits there doing nothing until you set a specific bitrate.

If you leave it on eg never play videos in high quality which stops it starting on auto but starts on 360p usually and then can manually switch to 720p, this used to work fine everytime, but now sometimes it tries to switch to 720p whilst still playing 360p (so seamless switch), when its doing this you see the clog icon spinning round and its buggy as well. Also when it does this 720p no longer buffers all the way to the end full speed like it used to. google cant stop messing around with youtube and as a result bugs happen. I dont know how bad youtube is on VM atm but its buggy currently on its own side, which might explain some of what people are seeing lately.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

lhr22x10 :

No ping or jitter issues?

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I see the bugs occasionally, but the things I have reported to sky only happen during peak time, so any youtube bugs can be ruled out there

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

yes the issues I mentioned are 24/7 issues.

On BT I notice no difference peak and off peak how youtube performs.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

The complaints on Virgins forums started over 2.5 / 3 months ago and a fault reference raised by VM two months ago. Why have they not fixed this or given any official updates?

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I would guess that they can't :shocked: probably due to insufficient capacity problems.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Or flaky load balancing... or both

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

For it to go on for so long I figured it must have been something a bit more complex than capacity but VM's silence over this problem speaks volumes.

At then end of last year after VM customers had suffered for months already, they blamed a third party peer which seemed very suspect to say the least.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

It was woeful a couple of months ago but seemed to be getting better recently. Now tonight I'm getting a flashing buffering icon spinning at the start of the video I'm trying to watch, yet the progress timeline bar at the bottom completes right to the end. It's either a fault with Youtube tonight or dare I say another issue relating to VM servers?

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Well VM have started a new thread today, asking the same kind of information as the previous thread. Makes you wonder what they did with all the previous info as it appears not to have been used to fix the problem. Not much confidence that this time will be any different. Deja-vu....

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...ht/true#M23450

Part of the statement on the old thread that started 2 months ago shows that the problems are VM capacity issues. No surprise there! From page 48 of that thread:

What I can tell you is that we've continued to add additional capacity to our Content Delivery Network over the past few weeks, specifically in the West Midlands and the East of England, alongside some general network capacity improvements.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

the bit in bold further highlights the postcode lottery on VM.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

They have split the thread off again, probably so they can have a "clean" thread to send people to waste their time posting information for Virgin to ignore, rather than one populated with complaints.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

More like so to make the problem look less severe, dont forget the community forums are public and can put a dent in the companies reputation, having 5 50 page threads looks better than 1 250 page thread

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

People will complain any which way or how if they have a grievance.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Still buggered for me: http://youtu.be/Kf8lXBs9gMs

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

What Anti-Virus program are you using? Reason why i ask One of my PC i use f-secure and i keep getting the same message the other 1 i use AVG and it works fine.

I have been told certain Anti-Virus can block YouTube from functionally correctly.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

My TV doesn't have anti-virus, it's a TV.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

My parents regularly see this issue using Youtube on their TIVO box.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Good point.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

lmao

---------- Post added at 20:54 ---------- Previous post was at 20:54 ----------

Thats Youtube settings, its always done that with SD videos, HD carries on buffering

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

That's a complex question to answer in one word.

The Flash player controls the main behaviour of this, depending on the resolution you select. 720p and 1080p used to load the whole video at once. Though I'd say as YouTube's infrastructure is creaking under the strain of serving so much more video to people these days they're doing a lot of load-balancing which is affecting peoples experience of how fast things load.

The Flash player itself requests data in chunks. So changes to the Flash player versions have changed behaviour some and not always for the good. e.g. There have been some micro-releases of Flash recently (which get auto-updated in Chrome) that have broken that functionality.

The YouTube architecture is built around load-balancing, so expect to not get all the video all the time.

Also the server the Flash player connects to may give you chunk 1 fast but then not give you chunk 2 if you pause when the server is particularly busy.

VM's CDN (cache servers) had an intermittent problem recently where they would serve chunk1 fast, but load chunk2 very very slow (so slow that it looks like it's stopped loading). This caused problems when your video caught up with how much it had loaded. It's an inherrant weakness of the Flash/YouTube design. VM said it was down to a routing issue at the time, I'm dubious about that but it seems to be working fine again now. At least for me.

Any behaviour you experience is going to be down to a combination of the version of Flash you are running and the video server you're connecting to in the moment. Which could even be YouTube's backup servers in California if you can't contact VM's CDN because it's too busy.

The only way to know for sure what's going on is to run Firebug's Flash tab to monitor how much data is loading, when and from what server.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I cant play any videos on youtube tonight.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Working fine for me right now.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

This fix here posted by Southwaleschris works for me...

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...1883530/page/7

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

The fix is to block 206.111.0.0/16.
Quite a few people have reported success with this. I've just tested it myself and yeah, 1080p fills up very quickly. Purely anecdotal at this point but what I find interesting is that this isn't a VM IP and that a lot of people blocking this to speed up youtube videos (And Netflix, it seems) are from all sorts of ISPs around the world.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Yeah, it's XO Communications, which peers with Google and with Level 3.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

So how does that work, exactly? Presumably someone pays XO to act as a CDN, but is it Google or Virgin (Or someone else in the chain)?

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

I used open DNS and it seems to have cured the youtbube problems i was having.

https://store.opendns.com/setup/oper...stem/windows-7

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Good question.

Generally CDN's pay the ISP for eyeballs. 80% of data is video these days and most goes downstream to the user. CDN's get paid by the likes of YouTube and Netflix, though Netflix has its own CDN OpenConnect now which they try to route most of their traffic through.

I haven't seen XO used as a CDN for myself in Scotland, though some users might be CDN'd differently and even on a per-video basis. Which makes it complex to say exactly what's happening without some diagnostic info.

Settlement-free peering seems to be more common in europe, with Internet eXchanges.

---------- Post added at 18:38 ---------- Previous post was at 18:01 ----------

It's interesting to note that most of the money flows downstream towards the user until it gets to the ISP's. Really we should be paid for using the internet as it's mostly advertising based, which is how the companies at the top of the chain make their money ; see google search as a classic example.

---------- Post added at 18:47 ---------- Previous post was at 18:38 ----------

Time Warner Cable: No, we don’t throttle YouTube — it’s all about peering:
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/time-wa...about-peering/

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Blocking 206.111.0.0/16 really does seem to have helped here too.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

guys try youtube high definition addon, if using firefox.

set 720p as default, then see if helps.

I found this stops the lame set to auto google is trying to push now and if no 720p is available it at least falls back to 360p instead of auto. As even on BT youtube has been funny last week or so due to this stupid auto bitrate option.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

iPlayer seems to be broken now. YouTube is degrading again, after more or less working for a couple of weeks.

We just seem to be stuck in a cycle of failed upgrades that don't really fix the problem and become totally inadequate within a few weeks maximum.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Not here, folks.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Iplayer and YouTube were flying for me last night :)

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

Same here as my partner uses it a lot.

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

[img]Download Failed (1)[/img]

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

:lol::lol::lol::lol:

Re: YouTube totally broken now
 

:LOL: