Today's pet peeve: YouTube's new design

[Christopher]

My problem with the new YouTube format is that it won't play smoothly on my computer in full screen. Videos play normally as insets, but when I expand them to full screen, they get all jerky and staccato, though the sound still plays normally. It's the same problem I had with Vimeo videos until I realized I could turn off the HD. But I can't seem to set the new YouTube videos to anything other than 360p. Am I missing some sort of plugin that would fix this? Is there something I can do to my computer memory to improve things? Or am I stuck with this problem until I can buy a more modern laptop? (Oh, by the way, I use Firefox.)

 

[Owain Taggart]

Apparently YT measures your internet speed and then sets video quality, i can't find an option to permanently set quality to highest possible or at least 720p if available.

The odd thing is, Google recently put out a speed test as part of a demonstration on video bandwidth, and my speed scored really good. So, I'm not sure how it's calculating that on YT's end. Seems glitchy. And 150p is just too low to be of real use.

 

[FPAlpha]

I have the same problem. I have a 50 MBit line which can download at over 5 MB/s yet sometimes YT sets the lowest quality possible with 144p even if there are HD versions available.

It's annoying as hell but not much one can do other than change the resolution manually.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, that's true, and it does seem like they're still tweaking it, because I noticed the other night when I went to view a video that it started out in HD.

Speed is always fluctuating, so I think that maybe if it doesn't detect a high response right away, it sets it low even when there's capability to go much higher.