YouTube currently delivers video by only buffering short segments of the video at a time. This is fine for people most of the time. For some though, it can be a problem when they have slow internet or want to watch video at a quality better than their internet is capable of streaming.
For those times, this handy bookmarklet will take the URL of the YouTube video you want to watch and convert it into the full buffer version.
This means you can choose the desired quality/resolution you want to watch, start the video, then just pause it and wait until you have a good chunk buffered.
Now, when you hit play again, it should avoid the stop/start you constantly get normally if you pause it for long enough. Also, you can skip anywhere along the video parts that have buffered already and it should play instantly.
As a quick one-off, just change:
/watch?v=hxRoK5LZa_A
to
/v/hxRoK5LZa_A?version=2
For automating this, here’s the bookmarklet
javascript: (function(){ var baseUrl = window.location.href; var videoIdCatch = baseUrl.match(/watch\?v=.+); if(!videoIdCatch || !videoIdCatch[0] { console.log(videoIdCatch); console.log(“did not find video”); return; } var videoId = videoIdCatch[0].substr(8); videoId = videoId.trim(); if(videoId && videoId !== “”) { var targetUrl = “http://www.youtube.com/v/” + videoId + “?version=2”; window.location.href = targetUrl; return; } console.log(“could not find video id”); })();
To use the above code…
- Right click your bookmark bar,
- Select “add page…”
- Type whatever you want to call it into the “Name:” area
- Copy the above code into the URL area
And there you go!
