[higherpurpose]

I agree it's annoying. In its effort to save seconds of bandwidth from each video, Google has made everyone's Youtube experience worse.

Fine, don't load the whole video ahead of time, but can you just load the first say 30 seconds? Or maybe even - and I know this is going to sound crazy - a whole minute ahead of time?

I remember a time when it seemingly didn't load even 5 seconds ahead of time. That's just ridiculous. Fire the bean counters who are in charge of that short-sighted idea.

[anon4]

I remember a time when the flash player loaded the entire video to a temp file and you could just go through /proc/$firefox-pid/fds, find it and dump the video that way.

[teach]

Pretty sure I still have a bash script laying around to automate this process.

[mkagenius]

The behavior is different for different resolution videos I think. Instead of seconds, I think they download x kilobytes ahead of time. Just try 360p vs 1080p (for same video).

[cpeterso]

YouTube's playback latency is critical. If users have to wait for the video to buffer, they are more likely to close the tab and do something else.

[Dylan16807]

It's a limit on how much it buffers while playing. It does not improve the playback experience in any way, and causes significant degradation when you seek the video.