Speed up YouTube videos playback with Feather Beta
Do you have a slow Internet Connection? If yes, then slow streaming / buffering of YouTube videos might be the problem you face on a daily basis. When we talked about fixing YouTube video reloads on fullscreen, I also covered modifying the video playback quality as per the connection speed. But now, here is another way too to watch YouTube videos at a faster buffer or stream rate!
YouTube has Feather Beta (launched in 2009), a low bandwidth version to watch videos at a faster rate. If you Internet Connection Speed is not that good to play videos at a regular rate or your Computer is a bit old or slow (eg. Netbooks), and not supports good video graphic acceleration, then this version can help a lot.
The Feather project serves YouTube videos to be watched with the lowest possible latency. While your switching to Feather Beta, you will notice all unnecessary and fancy elements removed from the video page such as posting comments, rating videos, customizing the embedded player etc., and you’ll see the actual video with “load time” clutter anymore.
Feather project involves the implementation of advanced web techniques to reduce the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser, hence making YouTube faster than ever. The video playback page of YouTube Feather for now is fully transferred after downloading 52 KB data whereas the standard YouTube playback page requires 391 KB for the same. Videos in Feather mode are light and optimized to play at a good rate on slow connections.
It is indeed an excellent step by Google in the way to make web more faster, but I noticed that Feather Beta is not working for every video at the instance. Hope Google will fix it up soon. So, are you going to try Feather Beta? Reach it through this link. Also, you can join and leave this YouTube beta anytime.
Also see how to fix No thumbnail problem with YouTube on Facebook.