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iPod touch New iPod Touch. YouTube incredibly slow

S

SebZen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 12, 2009
360
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Just got a 3rd gen iPod Touch. All is great, but YouTube is unusable for some odd reason. It takes ages to buffer and browsing vids also takes as long.

My router is Airport Express and Speedtest on the iPod shows 4Mb down. What could it be? I did some googleing of my own and found the most common "fix" is setting the router to b mode only. I tried that and it didn't help. Safari is smooth, everything is awesome, just this YouTube fluke...

Any ideas?
 
SebZen said:
Just got a 3rd gen iPod Touch. All is great, but YouTube is unusable for some odd reason. It takes ages to buffer and browsing vids also takes as long.

My router is Airport Express and Speedtest on the iPod shows 4Mb down. What could it be? I did some googleing of my own and found the most common "fix" is setting the router to b mode only. I tried that and it didn't help. Safari is smooth, everything is awesome, just this YouTube fluke...

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Interesting, I found setting mine to g mode was a vast improvement and videos now load 3-4 times faster than they play.
 
Depending on where I'm connected(e.g. my home, Starbucks, etc) I get different Youtube connection speeds. It would most definitely be Youtube and possibly your DNS connection. Have you thought about switching your DNS to OpenDNS or GoogleDNS? Both are very fast and make your web browsing and Youtube streaming speeds faster if you're on a slower IP given DNS.

OpenDNS

Google DNS

There's instructions on how to change them on the websites I've given.

I use Google DNS and it's exceptionally fast but I've heard OpenDNS is the fastest.
 
Alright I figured it out. I had PPoE set on my router (setting on the modem causes double NAT for me).

To narrow down options I switched it back to PPoE on modem, and viola, YouTube is smooth.

I'm going to switch back to router PPoE and try to mess around a bit more to see if I can keep it on the router with YouTube working
 
Nope nevermind. It worked just fine for a few hours and then it was back to the impossible slowness.

This isn't just YouTube I now realize. Anything video outside of Safari has trouble buffering.

For example I bought the GiantBomb app (video game video reviews) and it's not possible to watch videos from there too. During that short period of time YouTube app worked smooth, so did GiantBomb videos. But now neither buffers well again.

All my neighbors have their WiFi password protected so I can't try from them.

Please someone... help :(
 
Have you been installing apps and not restarting the iPod? Installing apps messes with the memory and most apps recommend restarting after installing.

If you haven't restarted, hold down the top button for a few seconds until you see the swipey thing for shutting it down. Leave it off for a count of 10 and then hit that top button again to start her up.

If that's not it, take note of the time of day when it's slow. You might see a pattern.
 
pilotrtc said:
Have you been installing apps and not restarting the iPod? Installing apps messes with the memory and most apps recommend restarting after installing.

If you haven't restarted, hold down the top button for a few seconds until you see the swipey thing for shutting it down. Leave it off for a count of 10 and then hit that top button again to start her up.

If that's not it, take note of the time of day when it's slow. You might see a pattern.
Click to expand...

Didn't do the trick =/ and I've been testing with YouTube at different times of the day ever since I got this touch. There doesn't seem a pattern. Last time streaming worked well was at this time last week, and I just tried again with no luck.
 
Can you try YouTube on your iPod at the same time you try it on your computer? If there's a huge discrepancy that might suggest a problem with the iPod. If not, then I think it's safe to say that it's YouTube.
 
pilotrtc said:
Can you try YouTube on your iPod at the same time you try it on your computer? If there's a huge discrepancy that might suggest a problem with the iPod. If not, then I think it's safe to say that it's YouTube.
Click to expand...

YouTube works perfectly with on my computer (also wireless).

And it isn't a problem with this specific iPod. I know this for a fact because I originally bought one at Walmart but later found that it's $35 cheaper on Amazon, so I returned it to Walmart and just a few days ago got the new one from Amazon.

Also if you do a search for slow youtube on ipod you'll get TONS of threads, which I've searched through all of them on the first 4 or so pages.

The most successful tip that helped most people was to turn the router to b mode only but like I said before, it didn't help my case, and b mode naturally cuts internet speeds by almost half, so it's certainly not a proper fix.
 
YouTube generally works fine for me. I have an Apple Airport at home with WPA2 Personal security setup.
 
pilotrtc said:
YouTube generally works fine for me. I have an Apple Airport at home with WPA2 Personal security setup.
Click to expand...
When you say it works fine, how does it work exactly? Do videos start playing pretty much instantly for you and stay playing, or do they stop and pause now and then?

I also have WPA2.

Now that you have Airport too that makes it even weirder, because we know it isn't the router, nor the iPod.

I've played with every damn near setting on my router, I'm clueless.

Let me ask you a few questions:

What firmware do you have on your touch?
What radio mode do you use in Airport? n +b/g compatible?
What channel do you have it set to?
In Wireless Options what multicast rate and transmit power do you have?
 
I'd say that generally, the videos I choose to watch are mostly shorter than 5 minutes and those do pretty well with playing right away and little to no buffering waits.

When I choose to watch videos that are longer, and those tend to be around 10 minutes, I find that I sometimes have to wait a bit before it starts and sometimes it stops to buffer a few times in the beginning. If that happens, I will pause the playback until the rest of the movie loads and then play it when it's done loading. Sometimes, I have no discernible wait time before it plays or continues to play.

The version of the OS I am running is 3.1.2 (7D11). I have a 2nd generation and it has a capacity of 32 GB. I am using 29.6 GB at this time.

I'm not at home right now to check the settings of my Airport but I can't imagine me doing anything fancy to it because as soon as it worked, I left it alone. I've had it for a few years now... probably at least 2 1/2 years... not sure exactly... could be 3 or more.

I will follow up tonight with answers to your other questions.
 
pilotrtc said:
I'd say that generally, the videos I choose to watch are mostly shorter than 5 minutes and those do pretty well with playing right away and little to no buffering waits.

When I choose to watch videos that are longer, and those tend to be around 10 minutes, I find that I sometimes have to wait a bit before it starts and sometimes it stops to buffer a few times in the beginning. If that happens, I will pause the playback until the rest of the movie loads and then play it when it's done loading. Sometimes, I have no discernible wait time before it plays or continues to play.

The version of the OS I am running is 3.1.2 (7D11). I have a 2nd generation and it has a capacity of 32 GB. I am using 29.6 GB at this time.

I'm not at home right now to check the settings of my Airport but I can't imagine me doing anything fancy to it because as soon as it worked, I left it alone. I've had it for a few years now... probably at least 2 1/2 years... not sure exactly... could be 3 or more.

I will follow up tonight with answers to your other questions.
Click to expand...

Ah don't bother in that case. I've played with all of them anyway. My sister has a 2G also (I have 3G) and she has the same problem.

I guess it narrows it down to my modem (which is about 4 years old - SpeedSteam 5100b from AT&T) but it has never given me problems and I can't imagine why I can stream YouTube, NetFlix, etc on my MBP wirelessly but not on the touches
 
Hullo

Just saw this posting. I was googling around for the same problem; slow youtube streaming on my new ipod touch.
I also have an iphone 2G and have never had issues with youtbue on my home router. But with the ipod, i can't watch even one video without random bufferring interruptions.

One test I did do: I got the speedtest.net app for both and did tests. While my iphone was seeing sustained 4 MBps downloads the ipod was wierd in that it would show a download of 10 MBps in some tests and a few 100 kbps in other tests. It wasn't consistent. I was doing tests with both alternatively at the same time and nothing else was really consuming b/w at that time. Perhaps others can test too.

srinivas
 
Hullo

Just saw this posting. I was googling around for the same problem; slow youtube streaming on my new ipod touch.
I also have an iphone 2G and have never had issues with youtube on my home router. But with the ipod, i can't watch even one video without random buffering interruptions.

One test I did do: I got the speedtest.net app for both and did tests. While my iphone was seeing consistent 4 MBps downloads the ipod was wierd in that it would show a download of 10 MBps in some tests and a few 100 kbps in other tests. It wasn't consistent. I was doing tests with both alternatively at the same time and nothing else was really consuming b/w at that time. I'm not sure what to make of this, but perhaps others can test too.

srinivas
 
Youtube on my iPod Touch and iPhone have always worked pretty poorly over my airport. It works fine on the computer. I haven't been able to figure it out, and it is terribly annoying. It's probably some random setting somewhere that's messing it up. It'd be nice to find out what it is.
 
My youtube is also ultra slow...its very annoying...i tried it on my laptop also and its too slow...takes forever to load a 2 3 minute video...i think its youtube that is having problems...
 
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