Virgin Media and shitty Youtube connection

[Tom]

If anyone's having issues with buffering on YouTube, through Virgin cable, try this:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5...e-buffering/m-p/1746698/highlight/true#M17896

I've just applied those rules (following that guide) and my YouTube performance has instantly improved.

 

[Trem]

Yes I am having issues, never even thought it was a Virgin issue, cheers Tomlarrington.

Edit - Works brilliantly, cheers big boy.

 

[Will]

I had to block a larger range of IP addresses to have an effect (62.252.0.0-62.255.255.255) but that seems far better now. No more videos not loading followed by "An error has occurred".

 

[Tom]

If it continues for much longer I think I'll ditch them and try BT Infinity.

 

[Raven]

Infinity is full of win.

 

[Billargh]

Can't wait until Infinity is in my area like, Virgin are an absolute shambles.

 

[Embattle]

Many years ago when I had Telewest Blueyonder it was a really good service, moved to a Business ADSL line a year or so before they merged with NTL and eventually became Virgin because quite honestly they've been rather problematic since it seems with Traffic management systems designed to annoy the crap out of the standard users.

 

[PLightstar]

I have always found clicking the time bar a few seconds before the buffering, will fix most problems. Aside from that and a broken TiVo box I haven't had a problem with their service. Yet my sister won't touch them as she had nothing but problems, no matter what they did to 'help'

 

[Billargh]

Our net's been fucked since moving into our new house in September, from around 4pm-11pm we'll be lucky to get 1-2Mb/s, most the times it's less. We ring up, they'll tell us it's a 'problem in the area' and will be resolved by xx date. xx date arrive with no fix, we ring again and they give us some shtick like, "You shouldn't have been told that date, here's the real one", rinse repeat. Cunts.

 

[Gray]

Did it a few days ago since i too am getting problems - When i did it, it "worked" fine afterwards. But now once again it's playing up.

 

[Trem]

Did it a few days ago since i too am getting problems - When i did it, it "worked" fine afterwards. But now once again it's playing up.

Yep same here, actually it is worse now, nothing will load. It appears to be fine on a wired pc but my laptop will not play anything through Youtube.

I get the 'an error occured please try again later' message on *every* video.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

I often find it's Flash's fault. Open the task manager, force it to close then reload the page. Flash has become unstable as hell recently and fucks up all the time.

 

[Tom]

Definitely Virgin's fault, there are epic threads on their support forums all about this. It seems Virgin are trying to cache a lot of YouTube content to save on bandwidth costs.

 

[Trem]

I have posted a thread on there mentioning that Tomlar, lets see what they say. Can you give me a link to the other threads about this issue please?

My thread

 

[Tom]

In here chap:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-60Mb-Speed/bd-p/60mbspeed

 

[Athan]

Yep same here, actually it is worse now, nothing will load. It appears to be fine on a wired pc but my laptop will not play anything through Youtube.

I get the 'an error occured please try again later' message on *every* video.

Well, this entire method is centered around blocking certain youtube caches, so if your browser, for whatever reason, doesn't then decide to actually try additional ones of course nothing will work. It having worked before may have been simply because the "ook, can't reach that, try another" has a limit to how many it will try and you happened to hit a non-blocked one before you got there. But other times all it tries are the ones you've blocked and thus it won't load.

So, yeah, what people actually want to do is complain very loudly at Virgin Media to get them to actually fix their shit.

Alternatively, if you can find a cache you're sure works for you you might possible be able to do something locally with DNS to make all others resolve to that one (i.e. some wildcarding to either force them to have A records of that one's IP, or maybe use a CNAME). In fact you'd likely do better using hosts.txt to redirect the known bad hostnames to an IP you know works for you.

 

[Trem]

I deleted the firewall rules that I created from Toms first post and everything is working perfect now. Maybe VM have sorted the issue and the rules are cocking it up.

 

[rynnor]

I deleted the firewall rules that I created from Toms first post and everything is working perfect now. Maybe VM have sorted the issue and the rules are cocking it up.

Yup - definately worth backing up the existing files before you alter anything.

The ISPs are always tinkering with this sort of thing so any benefits are going to be temporary.

Edit - I'm dumping Virgin soon - despite an allegedly 60Mb connection it has lots of issues especially at peak times.

 

[Athan]

Such network issues are one reason I'm very happy to pay the premium for an ISP like Zen Internet. For pure IPv4 connectivity I've seen maybe 3-5 issues in the 8.5 years I've been using them. No enforced proxies, no bandwidth rate limiting or shaping. The downside is monthly bandwidth caps that some of you will consider low and an extortionate rate to extend them, but I'm happy on the 100GB cap. I really only come close to busting it if consciously making an effort through TV/Movie downloads, outside of doing that I don't even hit 50GB regularly.

I can't comment on their hosted email/web stuff though as I do all that myself separately.

Also, because I've had next to no issues, I can't actually really comment on their customer support. I only had to deal with them the once for what turned out to be a 'stale session' problem which fixed itself during the phone call. The chap I was talking to did seem knowledgeable though, just the issue fixed itself by the time we'd gotten through the initial script bits.

I do keep wondering when they'll finally start offering native IPv6 (dual stack with IPv4) though. I think I volunteered at some point to be a guinea pig.

 

[Tom]

YouTube appears to have been fixed now. Virgin sent me something called a Superhub, which didn't work when I plugged it in. Then I discovered you have to phone them up for it to be activated.

So I put it back in the box and will probably chuck it in the bin. My modem and wireless router work fine, why would I want that big ugly thing?

 

[Wazzerphuk]

The Superhub they send people is terribad. The wireless on it is supposed to be atrocious.

 

[Trem]

The Superhub they send people is terribad. The wireless on it is supposed to be atrocious.

Thats putting it mildly, it is very bad.

 

[Embattle]

Least with Virgin you can still use your own hardware, chumps who sign up Sky are forced to use a even worse Sky hub and the service is designed so you can use anything else (It is possible but very very hard).

 

[Bodhi]

Least with Virgin you can still use your own hardware, chumps who sign up Sky are forced to use a even worse Sky hub and the service is designed so you can use anything else (It is possible but very very hard).

We're on Sky here, can't say I've found an issue with the router they gave us. Easier to set up than our old HomeHub, everything connects fine, connection out is stable and faster than the old BT one we had. Still works fine during peak Times too.

 

[Moriath]

YouTube appears to have been fixed now. Virgin sent me something called a Superhub, which didn't work when I plugged it in. Then I discovered you have to phone them up for it to be activated.

So I put it back in the box and will probably chuck it in the bin. My modem and wireless router work fine, why would I want that big ugly thing?

Some of the older modems can't handle the throughput of 120mb and stuff. So they send out superhub. You can disable its wifi and just use it instead of the modem and cable through to your current router.

 

[Embattle]

Least with Virgin you can still use your own hardware, chumps who sign up Sky are forced to use a even worse Sky hub and the service is designed so you can't use anything else (It is possible but very very hard).

Fixed an error.

We're on Sky here, can't say I've found an issue with the router they gave us. Easier to set up than our old HomeHub, everything connects fine, connection out is stable and faster than the old BT one we had. Still works fine during peak Times too.

I've not got one personally I know a friend at work who has and he hates it compared to his Billion 7800N, I've also seen the latest router test in PCPRO which gave it 2/6 and stated:

Poor wireless performance and a limited feature set, at a high price for existing customers

I've no doubt it works but I consider dual band a requirement and the Sky Hub doesn't have it whereas the Virgin and BT hubs now support dual band and I personally consider being able to pick my own router a basic requirement.

 

[SFXman]

Seems like this is a fairly international problem. My ISP here in Finland has the same thing, YouTube slow even with a 100/10MB VDSL... guess ISPs really are starting to think who should pay for bandwidth taken by relatively heavy 1080p streaming video.

 

[Gray]

Bastards where carrying out maintenance on my road. But somehow killed my internet access. Cant get it fixed until tuesday now

 

[Gray]

aha. in a good turn it got fixed straight after i posted this, luck was on my side.