YouTube playback stuttering problem, due to very slow streaming, help!

I have a strange problem that playing more demanding YouTube videos quickly leads to stuttering/buffering - but if I download the video first, then it plays just fine on my X1000. In fact it stutters straight away unless I tell MPlayer to use a cache, but no matter how large the cache it eventually stutters.

So it seemed like my download speed must be very slow.

I timed how long Curl took to download a 10MB file from my website, and got a download speed of about 3.2MB/sec - which is not far off the 4.3MB/sec I got from my Windows PC. So my Amiga's network connection seems fine.

This lead to the suspicion that it's just my YouTube download speed that is bad. A quick test shows my Amiga takes about 19 seconds to download 1MB of a YouTube video (using Curl) - that's a terrible 0.05MB/sec . No wonder I get stuttering YouTube playback!

Does anyone else have (or not have!) this problem, or have an idea how to solve it?



For what it's worth, I am using YT to play/download YouTube videos:
http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/misc/yt.lha

And I was using this version of Curl:

curl 7.39.0 (powerpc-unknown-amigaos) libcurl/7.39.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1j zlib/1.2.8 librtmp/2.3
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: NTLM SSL libz TLS-SRP

But I then updated to the latest version on OS4Depot, without any improvement:

curl 7.79.1 (powerpc-unknown-amigaos) libcurl/7.79.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1l zlib/1.2.11 librtmp/2.3
Release-Date: 2021-09-22
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher gophers http https imap imaps mqtt pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: alt-svc AsynchDNS HSTS HTTPS-proxy libz NTLM SSL TLS-SRP

@ChrisH
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Yes, I seem to be having the same problem with my X1000. YouTube has been slow for maybe a month or so. Most recently it seems even downloading from OS4Depot has become very slow. Something isn't right but I don't know what. I'm running AmigaOS 4.1 Final with all the latest Enhancer 2.1 Updates.
I think I'll try reverting back to an older system image and see if things get better.

When I monitor downloading from OS4Depot with NetSpeedometer, it appears the internet connecton is downloading for a couple of seconds, then stops for for a couple of seconds and keeps repeating this sequence making the download very slow.

I'm using an RTL8169 card in my X1000.

@ktadd
Ok, after trying t few things I power cycled my cable modem and the start/stop issued is resolved. OS4Depot now downloads like it used too.

However, YouTube still has issues playing videos, via YT. I'm wondering if YouTube has throttled downloads. They seem to play fine if I play them in the browser.

@ktadd

YouTube has throttled. I've heard there are some updates to our tools in the works to address it.

@tekmage & @ktadd
Thanks for confirmation it's YouTube that seems to be doing the throttling. I have one work-around I want to try.

Without getting into specifics, it's something YouTube did, and I know how to solve it. Should have something ready this week.

@MickJT
It would be great if you did. I tried some simple tricks with user agent, referrer, and cookies, without luck.

@chrish
This is something that comes from YouTube. But, based on my experience, this is not the case with YouTube live streams. Please try that as well.

Nice...YT works again!
Thanks to those who fixed it!

Yeah, the newly updated YT seems to work great. In fact probably better than before, as I used to have issues with 720p, where-as now 720p works great (at least with some caching enabled in MPlayer).