One of the best things to happen to the internet is YouTube. Millions of users throughout the world have enjoyed and learned from it. As long as you don’t see the buffering wheel, watching those beautiful videos on YouTube is certainly entertaining. The days when you could stop a video, raise the quality to its highest setting, and wait for the buffering to finish are long gone. Over the years, YouTube has changed, but sometimes the most recent technology has problems.
Now, a few years ago, YouTube’s video player started using a technique known as DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). What it essentially does is buffer the video based on the user’s internet connection. The video buffering adjusts to the user’s internet speed to provide a smooth video streaming experience. When the streaming quality is set to Auto, the video quality is automatically determined. The player won’t fully buffer the video, but the user can manually switch to a higher quality streaming. So, a user with slow internet cannot fully enjoy enhanced video quality because the buffering would pause after a certain amount of time. There is a way to compel YouTube to buffer, as you would have anticipated. You may fully buffer a YouTube video on Chrome and Firefox by following these steps:
On Chrome
You can choose the approach that best suits you from the two options we provide for Chrome users. These techniques do have certain drawbacks, though, which we will address.
Method 1: Enable a Chrome Flag
You must enable a flag on the Chrome’s experimental features page to use the first technique. We must enable the Chrome flag Disable Media Source API. On this API, DASH playback is functional. We will therefore disable it. The flag has been removed in the most recent Chrome builds, which is the issue here. Moreover, it is only available in earlier versions, up to version 44 or 45.
Please take note that disabling Media Source API on your default browser will also effect other browsing functions. Also, running two instances of Chrome simultaneously under a single user account is not possible. Of course, you can set up a previous version of Chrome on a different user account. Yet that would be excessive to enable a flag. Yet, if you so choose, you can.
You should install an older Chromium release, in my opinion. Your experience with Google’s Chrome browser will be largely the same because it is built on Chromium builds. Although developers are the main users of Chromium, you may use it to improve your YouTube experience.
Well, after doing enough investigation, I was able to find a link to download Chromium v41. Click here to download it. It is a ZIP file, not an installable, executable programme. Search for the Chromium executable file chrome.exe in the extracted folder after extracting the zip file.
Go to chrome:/flags in the Chromium browser now and look for the Disable Media Source API flag. To disable the API, you must enable the flag and click Relaunch Now. If any error warnings appear, disregard them.
YouTube will now be able to buffer videos completely. One restriction you might notice is that, as demonstrated in the screenshot below, you are unable to increase the video quality to a higher level.
It is the only restriction you will run into. The video will fully buffer, though.
Method 2: Changing the URL
So, all that is needed to use this strategy is to modify the YouTube video’s URL. You can utilise this strategy if you don’t like the one mentioned above. Nevertheless, there is a drawback to this approach as well, which we’ll discuss later.
So, you only need to modify the video’s URL in the manner described below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID Original URL
The URL has been changed to https://www.youtube.com/v/ID?version=2.
The URL only needs to be changed, and the ID must remain the same (without curly braces). Now, to simplify this process, you can use Chrome Omnibox’s search settings to avoid the effort of independently copying the ID.
Navigate to Chrome’s settings and select Manage search settings from the Search menu.
You can modify the various search settings for the various websites here. We’re planning to include a special search setting of our own.
You can add whatever search engine name you like, and you can choose your own term as well. Copy and paste the aforementioned updated URL here in the URL area. Now, replace “ID” with “%sand,” and then click “Finished.”
Now, all you have to do to activate this search setting is type the keyword into the Omnibox and press the Tab key on your keyboard. Simply copy-paste the ID from the YouTube video’s URL and press Enter to continue. This GIF ought to help you understand better.
On Firefox
The restriction in this case is that just the video player loads while using this Address. a YouTube video playing in its entirety. Thus, you won’t be able to view any side comments or suggestions. However, the video will play at its highest quality and, when paused, will fully buffer.
Users of Firefox may completely simple make YouTube fully buffer the videos. Just install an extension, you guys. Its official name is YouTube without DASH Playback. In actuality, this plugin will make all HTML5 video players DASH-incompatible.
Technically speaking, it simply sets media.mediasource.enabled to false in Firefox’s about:config page. In order to accomplish this manually, open Firefox’s about:config page, look for media.mediasource.enabled, and set it to False.
You can download the extension from the site provided below, nevertheless, if you prefer its comfort. To activate it, simply tap on the extension icon. And to turn it off, tap once more. It goes without saying that using this strategy will prevent you from upgrading to a higher quality. You can only switch to 720p in Firefox.
Download YouTube through Firefox Add-on without DASH Playback
Forcing YouTube to Fully Buffer Videos
SEE ALSO: 10 Awesome Chrome Extensions For YouTube