Quote:
Originally Posted by heero_yuy
Youtube still works fine for me but I have noticed a new behaviour: Whereas when you used to pause the playback, the spooling would continue. Now it stops almost immediately and only resumes when you start playback again.
Is this because it's coming through VMs buffer?
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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.