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YouTube Keeps Buffering

  • 7 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 11 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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This is a recent problem that I haven't had before and none of the answers I've seen have solved my problem. Whenever I try to watch a YouTube video, it buffers for a long time. Sometimes I never get past an ad because it will stop two or three seconds in and the only way I can get it going again is to refresh the page. I have to constantly refresh to hopefully get a five second ad or one that I can skip in order to get to the actual video and when I get there, it starts buffering and at that point it either plays after a minute or two or it doesn't play at all. It does the same thing in safe mode. The only time I'm able to watch videos without this problem is in a private window.

I have uninstalled Firefox two times and refreshed multiple times, but nothing seems to be working. Every other website I get on works fine, but videos don't fully load on any of them. Can some please help me, I've been trying to figure this out for hours and I really don't want to use another browser.

This is a recent problem that I haven't had before and none of the answers I've seen have solved my problem. Whenever I try to watch a YouTube video, it buffers for a long time. Sometimes I never get past an ad because it will stop two or three seconds in and the only way I can get it going again is to refresh the page. I have to constantly refresh to hopefully get a five second ad or one that I can skip in order to get to the actual video and when I get there, it starts buffering and at that point it either plays after a minute or two or it doesn't play at all. It does the same thing in safe mode. The only time I'm able to watch videos without this problem is in a private window. I have uninstalled Firefox two times and refreshed multiple times, but nothing seems to be working. Every other website I get on works fine, but videos don't fully load on any of them. Can some please help me, I've been trying to figure this out for hours and I really don't want to use another browser.

All Replies (7)

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It says everything is up to date.

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Is there a big difference between a private window and a normal one? My videos play fine in a pw, no buffering and they start right away. In fact, a normal Firefox window is the only one giving me problems with videos. Explore and Chrome work fine, but I don't like either of those browsers.

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Messing around with the privacy settings, I found out that it's the cookies that's giving me problems. When I set it to block cookies from YouTube the videos played fine, but as soon as I took it off the list my problem came back. Is there anything I can do for that?

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I called for more help.

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It is possible that security software (anti-virus, firewall) is causing the problem. Try to disable security software temporarily to see if that makes a difference.


Do a malware check with several malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.

Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware. All these programs have free versions.

Make sure you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

See also: