Google Video Problems

I have been having problems with video clips on the internet lately, some with Google, some with YouTube (is there a difference?). I have a longish video (ten minutes or so) that I have been trying to upload off and of for months, and it just won't go. I've let it run overnight and come down in the morning and it is still just sitting there spinning it's little upload-in-progress spinner.

I tried to upload some shorter clips (ten seconds or so) along with a bunch of photos to Picasa the other day. All the photos went, but none of the videos. Had to send them again. It did work the second time.

And then there are the playback problems. Seems like if it is a popular clip, it generally plays smoothly, but if it is anything out of the ordinary there are hiccups and glitches and it's very annoying. I can understand that there are times when you might not be able to deliver obscure video XYZ in a timely manner, but could you at least equip your video player with a "wait till download is complete before starting playback" button?

Right now the only way to accomplish this is to let the download play to completion and then hit the replay button, which means you have to watch it twice, or get up and go for a walk. Wouldn't want to do anything else on the computer that might jeopardize this download.

There was a clip of a deleted scene from "Pulp Fiction" that I wanted to add to my post on communication, but it just would not play smoothly, it kept getting delayed, and not just little hiccups, delays on the order of a minute or more. So I thought I would capture it, upload my own private, re-pirated copy, and maybe that will play smoother. To make a long story short, that was also a bust.

I quickly found, downloaded and installed a demo version of a video capture program. For some bizarre reason, it needs to be started before the browser. Which means replay won't work, because video clips are not cached in the normal sense. So I launch the program, launch the browser, pull up the video clip and go read for a while. I come back and the capture program has stopped with an error. What's the error? No info, just an error. No video today, you come back later.