Speedup Youtube streaming

I have got two internet connections (for network redundancy to keep my sites up – as I host them myself :)).

1. DSL connection of PTCL
2. Cable connection of WorldCall

On PTCL YouTube and other video sites would buffer/stream really fast, whereas on WorldCall I had to pause for the whole video to load in order to avoid the jittery/buffering video pauses.

One thing to note here is that WorldCall was also having network traffic overload problem on my node (which they won’t agree but my tests confirmed it :-x). The 2nd “part” of the problem which was that the DNS servers of WorldCall were fetching IPs of the YouTube video servers that were slow (tracert revealed that the route had too many hops and the route had a number of weak links that were slowing down the streaming).

The solution below solves the 2nd problem (and it is really worth a try !!)

The Solution:

Change DNS servers 😀 I changed them to OpenDNS DNS servers:

Primary: 208.67.222.222

Secondary: 208.67.220.220

(Optional steps)

If you use Firefox and OpenDNS, your address-bar search of Firefox is ‘hijacked’ by OpenDNS search which is powered by Yahoo!

To overcome that follow the steps in this post – OpenDNS and Firefox.

Explaination:

The DNS servers of OpenDNS returned YouTube’s video server IPs which had MUCH better routes and hence better streaming !!

PS: If you don’t need a static IP and your phone line is good, get PTCL !! Its MUCH cheaper than WorldCall and better speeds and pings on international servers too !! Will be posting a comparison between the two very soon.