2y ago

Replaying a video on YouTube makes it buffer all over again instead of it playing instantly like Chrome does. Is there any fix for this?

Re-buffering happens if you replay a video after it buffers completely till the end and if you click on the timeline far enough back during buffering.

I've looked through many threads but didn't find any fix/workaround for this. I saw some users saying changing values for media.cache_readahead_limit and media.cache_resume_threshold to 99999 fixed it but that didn't help and actually caused Firefox to stop buffering midway through videos.

15 comments

Wouldn't surprise me if nothing could be done to fix this. It might help if the quality level was fixed instead of variable.

I just compared the behavior in both Chromium and Firefox on my machine, and as far as I can tell, they act the same.
Steps to reproduce:
Open a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erQ9yEz0ls
Play the last 10 seconds
Click "replay" button in the YouTube player
What happens:
The buffer is cleared in both browsers.
What are you seeing that is different?
- You're supposed to let it play/buffer all the way till the end. Then press replay or when you're like 50-60% through the video, click on the timeline far enough back i.e 1 min.
  For example, when this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y finishes playing for me, and I press replay, YouTube starts rebuffering the video from scratch. In Chrome's case, the buffer is still there.

not sure , but maybe it is media codec/encoding related?
You could maybe try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhanced-h264ify/ to check.
- It's not, because my CPU supports VP9 hardware decoding.
  
  By anychance, do you have free ram? Sometimes this happen when the ram is not available... so yeah.. You should check it first. Also check about:memory I guess

Nope. That's one of the ways Google intentionally disadvantages browsers other than Chrome.
Install a user agent switcher and set it to the most recent Chrome agent string. You'll probably see a long of jank go away...
- Yeah. And I actually tried changing user agent with this but still no luck. Tried incognito as well with chrome's UA. Re-buffers the same as always.

15 comments