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Android YouTube app not properly buffering.

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I'd like to start off by stating that I have a 100mbps download rate (I've seen it peak at about 120mbps). My wifi is perfectly fine, and I get around 80mbps off my phone.

On Desktop, when I watch YouTube videos, I can watch 4K videos with absolutely no buffering problems. When I look at stats for nerds, I see that the player buffers ahead, to keep the buffer around a certain number of seconds ahead. It will frequently buffer in the background, to make sure playback does not stop. As it should. This is how all video streaming should be for any website.

However, when I use the YouTube Android app, there are MAJOR buffering problems. A large issue is using the "auto" setting (which it selects automatically). In theory, I like this concept. It measures my speed and changes the quality accordingly. However, I've seen it just pop down to 360p, and then quickly go back to 720p/1080p. There's also points where the video will lag. As in, it pauses (not buffering) every second or so, only when the auto setting is on. But this isn't the main issue. If I select a specific resolution, it stops lagging. The main issue is that the buffering is completely useless on mobile. It only buffers like every 20 seconds. Or when it feels like it, I guess.

I turned on stats for nerds, and played a video at 720p on my phone. At first, it would buffer a readahead of about 5 to 10 seconds, and then just use up all of that, and sit and "load" (not actually buffering. No network activity is shown) with the little spinny white circle thing, and then finally buffer another 5 to 10 seconds worth of video, and rinse wash repeat. Eventually, it sits and "loads" for like 10 seconds, and then all the sudden the buffer works ahead and actually uses my bandwidth to load about 120 seconds of video. Nice. And it kept it around there for a bit, buffering every few seconds, creating nice seamless playback. Eventually it started to fall behind and the time to start buffering started taking longer than the buffer was being filled. So I switched it to 1080p. If you look at the screenshot I attached, you'll see the graphs of me trying to do this. The beginning of the graph is me at 720p, and when the readahead turns to white, is when it got to about 120 seconds extra, and then you can see it start to fall behind and then it completely drops when I change it to 1080p. Once I turned it to 1080p, I sat and waited as it "loaded", until it finally buffered like 7 seconds of video, only to "load" again once that 7 seconds was up. Rinse wash repeat. Until eventually the buffer did something similar to before, and gave me like 30 seconds worth of buffer, and kept it around there for a bit, until it started giving up again and letting the buffer run out.

The thing that is annoying me, is how stupid the buffer is. Look at the bandwidth graph. You can very clearly see large gaps in between each buffer call. For some reason the buffer is waiting so long to actually do anything, even if my app is "loading", which I'd figure is telling the server to hurry up and send some data. Then eventually the buffer smartens up, and actually uses a larger fraction of my bandwidth to actually stablely buffer the video. (where the 720p readahead goes white, and the 1080p goes yellow and green) Only to eventually peter off into the large gaps in buffer calls again. I don't get this algorithm here. My phone is not moving. I sat it on my desk as I tested this. It was in the middle of the night, no one is using the internet in my house. And no matter when I watch videos, the buffer works properly on desktop. It's just this app, that is very very very stupid, with its buffering.

I have a Galaxy S10+, does anyone else have a similar issue, and maybe some sort of setting or something I can change to maybe help? Or am I SOL because this app just actually sucks?

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