Google & YouTube

yet another google-based timesuck

I have been having trouble playing some videos on my computer. The trouble comes in two flavors. One is the little glitches in playback: a moments' hesitation when the playback catches up with the download. If the download speed were slower than the playback speed, that would be one thing, but it's not. Sometimes if I click on pause the entire rest of the video will load in couple of seconds and I can continue the playback without running into anymore of those annoying little hesitations. Sometimes that does not work. I click on pause, and everything stops, the video pauses and the download also pauses. I click play and then every few seconds there is another glitch. Stupid computers.

The other problem shows up when a video is about halfway done and then it starts spazzing out. The red play line keeps jumping to the end and then back to the middle and playback stops. Pausing accomplishes nothing. No more is loaded, and no more is played. The red line does stop jumping around though.

I wrote to Google and complained about this and the next day the video that was embedded in my blog started working correctly. No message from Google, so there is no telling whether they actually fixed something, or whether it was just a fluke. The weird part is that even though the video in my blog would not play, the same video would play on the YouTube website. I think we may have to outlaw porn just so the internet is not totally clogged.

I got the graph from another website. It saved me having to muck about with mspaint to make my own, but it is not as big as the original. Click on the caption to see the original blog. You can generate your own on http://www.google.com/trends

Update December 2016 replaced missing graph.