Videos/youtube keeps buffering and it's driving me nuts

[darkchild101]

My tablet and phone keep buffering whenever I try to watch youtube or any online videos. Strangely my son has a chaep Nokia Asha phone and the same videos play seamlessly on his phone

Please help.

 

[MoodyBlues]

Hi there, darkchild101, and welcome to Android Forums.

Since you're experiencing this problem on both your phone and tablet, and this problem does not happen on your son's device, it's unlikely the issue is device related (not impossible, but unlikely). So a little more info is in order!

When you're playing videos, how are you connected? Wifi? 4G? What?

If you try a different method of connecting, is the result different?

And, just for clarity, please let us know which phone and which tablet you're using.

 

[darkchild101]

Hi
Thanks for replying. I am connected using wifi. Tablet is Samsung Tab 2 and the phone is a Sony xperia (less than a month old)

 

[nickdalzell]

try running it in the browser and not through the app. in the newest update, the only way to get fluid video playback in the app is to change the settings for every video from 'auto' to '240p' and i found that extremely annoying to have to do that on every video, when i can simply deselect 'HQ' and play any video i like through the site itself, and plus save internal storage being there's no app to worry about.

 

[chanchan05]

I have no problems with running the app in my connection. However in this case, yes it would seem to be a connection speed issue. The Youtube app streams at a higher quality image than when using the browser on a phone. This is why the same video loads faster on an Asha (which is recognized as using a mobile browser, thus compressed data is sent) as opposed to Android when using the YouTube app where you are allowed to get full quality.

 

[darkchild101]

I have no problems with running the app in my connection. However in this case, yes it would seem to be a connection speed issue. The Youtube app streams at a higher quality image than when using the browser on a phone. This is why the same video loads faster on an Asha (which is recognized as using a mobile browser, thus compressed data is sent) as opposed to Android when using the YouTube app where you are allowed to get full quality.

Any ideas? Someone suggested it might have something to do with flash.. Is this correct

 

[kate]

Do you know how fast your WiFi is? I believe you need at least 5Mbps for HD video.

When videos repeatedly buffer it means the data isn't being sent to your phone fast enough. Have you tried reducing the resolution as nickdalzell recommended?

 

[nickdalzell]

Google's app is set to 'auto' by default but it often won't work on slower connections in that mode (including my own 3G internet at home) so I have to use the browser. It's too annoying to constantly have to tick the lower quality mode for every video.

 

[chanchan05]

Nothing to do with flash. Your internet connection isn't fast enough for the quality you are trying to stream. You have to reduce it.