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One opens a youtube video in Safari. One clicks pause, waits a while, then clicks resume - nothing happens. One has to move the progressbar of the video a bit (the thing that shows at what point the video is in) and then the video starts.

I have this behavior since I first started usind Mac OS X (have reinstalled 10.5 and 10.6 at least once). I'm not sure, but I think I've seen this behavior with Chrome and with Google Videos.

Anyone?

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Happens to me as well and I also find it annoying. – Randy6T9 Sep 3 '11 at 16:19
One other glitch is thedailyshow.com - there the flash player resumes by itself after 5 min of pause. I hate it. – mist Nov 5 '11 at 10:13

2 Answers

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This sounds like a problem with the Flash player. you can edit the flash player's settings by going to: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

In the section "Website Storage Settings", increasing the amount of data youtube.com can store on your computer might help. Completely deleting youtube.com from the list of visited websites might also help (since that might get rid of any corrupt data).

If that doesn't work you can also try deleting the flash player's cache files manually.

just delete all the folders out of:

/Users/[YOUR USER NAME]/Library/Caches/Adobe/Flash Player/AssetCache

The folders should have names that look similar to "5PXNHG84" or "KK4Y5DSK".

Unfortunately, Flash for OS X (and linux) has never seemed to work as well as it does on windows. So what I just described still may not solve your problem, but it's worth a shot.

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Both don't seem to fix the problem. Settings manager has only 100kb per site. In the AssetCache folder I only have 4mb of data. HD youtube videos are way larger. – mist Nov 5 '11 at 10:14
Hmmm, bummer. I don't think that the cache folder caches the entire video. Most likely it's used to cache things like volume and preferred resolution settings, so I would expect it to be kind of small. Does this happen for every video you try to play? If not does it appear to happen randomly or is there a pattern (like only long videos have this problem, or only videos with a resolution of 360p)? – AdamP Nov 7 '11 at 15:55
It happens with most flash video players (youtube, google, vimeo, the rest). If the video is paused and resume shortly, then the video continues. If the pause is left for a while (I guess 10 minutes or smith), then it doesn't resume. – mist Nov 7 '11 at 16:04
up vote 1 down vote

Yes, I have the same issue with Chrome or Firefox. I think it’s the flash player (which I only have in Chrome/Firefox cuz I don’t have flash installed on my system)

Chrome has its own flash player integrated (which you can remove, but I use Chrome for sites when I MUST have Flashplayer).

When I switched to Safari, I had to use the HTML5 player in YouTube, I found out it happened way less (in exchange of other problems to be honest). But I prefer it that way.

It’s a matter of the video not being “streamed” to your machine, but rather progressive downloaded. I.e.: the player requests chunks; apparently it doesn’t really work well yet.

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Flash for Safari is hardware accelerated, while for other browsers it is not (on OS X). So using flash in Safari is way faster and way better. I found out that by chance. – mist Aug 8 '11 at 10:54
It also chews on your battery life as well, that's the downside to it. – Nicholas Smith Oct 3 '11 at 13:41
@NicholasSmith Indeed, in a MBA 11 it can decrease your Batt Life by two or three hours. – Martín Marconcini Oct 3 '11 at 19:15
I tried HTML5, but it's way more unstable. – mist Nov 5 '11 at 10:09

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