Why are youtube videos not caching?

  • Thread starter Seismica
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Seismica

Seismica

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I remember a time when videos would load in firefox, once. Then for the next few days (i.e. until the cache space is taken up by other information) it would load straight from the cache rather than having to re-download.

But I have noticed recently that this doesn't happen any more. If I reload a video it re-downloads the entire video and it can be very frustrating when the connection is slow.

I deleted my cache but it doesn't seem to help. I'm currently using firefox version 11.0. The video plays fine, it just doesn't want to cache. I guess it stops me using youtube for music if I want to play a track on repeat... but until I get around to buying the endless list of songs/albums I regularly listen to it's my only legit option.

Does anybody have a solution?
 
It may have to do with the size of the video. When Youtube first started, a 3-minute video might have been all of a megabyte, what with cheezy resolution and crappy compression.

As bandwidth and processor power have increased, so has video streaming capability, so the files are much larger, probably beyond the cache size limits.

There is always the possibility that The Man doesn't want His video files laying around anywhere that someone might have access to. [/Conspiracy Theory]

Both answers are pretty much WAGs, though.
 
I remember seeing a note around 10 days ago somewhere (I can't remember the site and can't locate it on google either), they were asking for confirmation of a rumor that Youtube has begun splitting the video stream into 1.5MB segments so your cached video is actually made up of many small chunks, rather than a complete file. This may mean that your video tools can't work on the files unless you connect to youtube.
 
Yeah they've stopped caching once you've finished the video. If you let it buffer fully but pause right before the video ends you can go back to the beginning and watch again.

It's idiotic that clicking the replay button 1 second after the video finishes means it deletes it from your drive and re-downloads but there you go. Considering that it's a problem with a video still on my screen then I doubt you will be able to re-watch a video that you've closed.
 
Thanks for the replies guys, well I suppose it's good that it's not just me that it's happening to. Youtube is forcing my hand with this because the video service they are providing is going downhill.

To Vimeo!
 

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