How To: Automatically buffer YouTube videos

As much as I love YouTube, I totally hate YouTube when the internet is slowing down and I’m stuck with a video that buffers on me every few seconds or so. Who else doesn’t find that annoying? You find a video you’re very excited to watch, and then you end up with that spinning loader of doom. When the video loads again, you’re granted only a few seconds of video time until it buffers again.

Sure, you can pause the video and let it load for a while before playing it, so why not find some way to automate the process of loading the video?

In fact, watching choppy, constantly buffering videos are getting to me so much that when I found a Greasemonkey UserScript that actually buffers YouTube videos and lets you play it at your own pleasure, I praised it to high heavens.

The YouTube Buffer Video Greasemonkey UserScript disables autoplay and lets your videos load to a point where you can (manually) play the video where you can watch it without the annoying buffer interruptions.

To use this, you need to have Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension/scripting engine installed. Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Install Greasemonkey and restart Firefox.

After doing that, go to this page and click on “Install”. You will encounter a prompt that will ask you if you are sure you want to install the script. Click on “Install” after the countdown.

After the UserScript is installed (no browser restart is necessary!), go to any YouTube page, and you’ll find that the videos aren’t playing automatically anymore. It’ll load and it’s up to you to decide when to play the videos!

If you like this UserScript, you can also try these other scripts:

• YouTube Alternate Video Player – Replaces the youtube flash video player with FlowPlayer flash video player. 
• YouTube Enhancer – Adds Download Link + Quality Selector + Rollover Preview + Media Controller to YouTube