Holy crap, there's a command line you can do in windows to make Youtube FLY

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Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
40,838
10,209
136
Wow, that does work. I have 15Mb roadrunner and sometimes Youtube works great but usually buffers a lot. Figured it was on Youtube's end. Guess not! Stupid throttling of the connection I am paying for - too much, really, given they pull this crap.

Going to see about just putting it in my router so it is blocked no matter what I use.
OK, someone post a link to one of these videos, 1080p, I presume. I want to test. My ISP I sort of trust, well, sort of... I don't do a lot of Youtubing but I've been having a devil of a time with Cisco Webex videos from one vendor. Buffering sometimes for 10 minutes before they'll start playing. I'm told 15 seconds would be what I should expect. I'm on sonic.net ADSL, which uses AT&T copper lines. I get between 4-5.3Mbps DL, about 0.87Mbps UL.
 
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Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
70,515
13,769
126
www.anyf.ca
links in OP are down. anyone have another?



many happy blessings

The gist of it is, you need to stop your network from being able to access these networks:

173.194.55.0/24
206.111.0.0/16

I just did it at my firewall so any PC on my network can't access them.

I have a post here that I will update if I hear of any other IPs:

http://www.iceteks.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5545&st=0&

Google is probably going to "fix" this so I'm sure there will be more IPs to block over time to stay ahead.
 

Nohr

Diamond Member
Jan 6, 2001
7,302
32
101
www.flickr.com
Wow, I'm watching 1080P Youtube videos with no buffering! That has NEVER happened before. Hell even 720P would give me problems. Thanks for the tip!

I'm on AT&T Uverse ADSL2+, btw.
 

skipsneeky2

Diamond Member
May 21, 2011
5,035
1
71
Worked for me. Youtube loads a lot faster now. If only there was something like this for Netflix.:)
My ISP is the crap known as Frontier Communications.

LOL i had a bigger piece of crap not to long ago called Windstream,the worst dsl ever and for fun you should check dslreports about them.:awe:

Windstream was so awful in my experience,i ended up going with Wildblue Satellite net,issue free besides high ping keeping me from fps online gaming.

I would wish Windstream on my enemies if i could.:awe:
 

JimmiG

Platinum Member
Feb 24, 2005
2,024
112
106
Can't say I notice any difference here. Occasional buffering when trying to play a video at 720p - entered the command - same occasional buffering. Even tried a reboot.

I have a 100Mb/s connection from ComHem and normally download at between 8 and 12 megabytes per second.
 
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ioni

Senior member
Aug 3, 2009
619
11
81
So far, no difference for me on win 7 64-bit. There are probably other cache networks.
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
65,469
5
76
Looks like all it does is block two /16 address spaces. You should be able to setup this kind of access list on your router.
 

Red Storm

Lifer
Oct 2, 2005
14,233
234
106
BIG help for me. We have Fios (75/35) and Youtube would buffer on anything over 320p, that was beyond ridiculous. Now it's all smooth.
 

ViviTheMage

Lifer
Dec 12, 2002
36,189
87
91
madgenius.com
Does this work for Mac using comcast?

It is not Mac that is the issue, it's comcast ... we don't peer with these IP's I think.

I tried blocking a few IP ranges in between that I thought might be packet shapers ... it helped a little bit, but I don't know if it's worth a damn, I did see a small speed boost in youtube videos ...
 

Lifted

Diamond Member
Nov 30, 2004
5,748
2
0
I forgot to mention this earlier, but I had to enable outbound blocking on these 2 ranges ranges as well in order for the firewall policies to work on my Win 7 system (is windows firewall supposed to open a socket for a blocked inbound IP range if an outbound request is made?). If you're doing this on with the Windows Firewall and not your router, you'll need to ensure the firewall is enabled.

If you want to find out if these firewall policies will have any effect on your youtube streaming, while youtube is open in a browser and playing a video, run netstat or netstat -b in an elevated command prompt window, or keep an eye on the resource monitors network tab. If you see an IP in the ranges of 206.111.x.x or 173.194.55.x in either netstat or resource monitor, then this may work for you (I say 'may' because there's no guarantee that the routes or CDN you end up on after blocking XO will be any better, though it is for most people. It's actually a bit easier in Resource Monitor as you can sort by Receive (b/sec) in the Network Activity section and the youtube stream should be at the top if you don't have any other high bandwidth network activity occurring while performing this test. If you don't see either of these IP ranges then you're not using the XO CDN and these firewall policies don't apply to you.

Here are the rules (You can verify they were created in the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security mmc (just start typing that in the start menu search, it will pop up in the list). You should see one policy created under Inbound Rules and one under Outbound Rules, both with the name block-XO-youtube-CDN. 173.194.55.0/24 appears to be a Google network, which I haven't hit myself, but the major /16 network is XO.

Inbound
Code:
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="block-XO-youtube-CDN" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
Outbound
Code:
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="block-XO-youtube-CDN" dir=out action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
You can remove the rules from Windows Firewall with Advanced Security, or type/paste this into an elevated command prompt
Code:
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="block-XO-youtube-CDN"
 
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SparkyJJO

Lifer
May 16, 2002
13,357
7
81
OK did some further testing and it does seem to be working better again, with both inbound and outbound rules. Thanks Lifted.
 

FelixDeCat

Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
30,973
2,676
126
Whats all the hub-bub about? "You people" need to stop fooling around with the internet. Youtube was fine for me on Charter but now its been acting weird thanks to you meddlers.

:colbert:
 

MikeyLSU

Platinum Member
Dec 21, 2005
2,747
0
71
weird, I am on TWC and it actually made it worse. Also tried the inbound/outbound thing from lifted, but it was the same.

Deleted rules and it works like it normally does. 720p perfect, 1080p with occasional buffering(sometimes none at all).

Oh well.