How to Play YouTube Videos Smoothly On Your Computer

You are watching some video clip on YouTube or Google Videos but the video isn't playing continuously - it keeps stopping and starting. So you watch the video clip for couple of seconds but soon give up, disappointed.

Don't blame your computer when Flash Video from Youtube isn't streaming smoothly - the culprit is either your slow internet connection or some download manager is transferring a file from the internet and that's consuming the available bandwidth.

No worries. Here's a "for dummies" method to ensure that Youtube videos playback smoothly on your computer:

Open the Youtube page and immediately press the Pause button on the Youtube player.

You'll see a red bar progressing towards the right. That indicates Youtube video is being downloaded onto your computer.

When the red bar reaches the extreme right, click the Play button. As the full video is available in your browser's cache, the playback will be very smooth.

The above trick can be applied to most video sharing sites like Blip.tv, Google Video or Metacafe that provide a Flash video player with Play/Pause controls.

Alternatively, you can download the YouTube Video clip as an FLV or MP4 file to your hard disk.

Google says that you need a broadband connection with at least 500+Kbps for the best viewing experience.