Make YouTube Streaming Significantly Faster On Windows

I do not know about you, but in recent times, YouTube has been acting agonizingly slow across all my computers. I have a 1mbps connection, which should technically provide smooth streaming of 480p video, but it regularly has trouble even with 240p video. Thankfully, we have come across a very simple hack that will significantly improve your YouTube video-viewing experience. Check it out after the jump.

Disclaimer: Follow this guide at your own risk. AddictiveTips will not be held responsible if running this command has any negative consequences.

• Launch Comamnd Prompt as Administrator on your Windows PC. To do so, hit the Windows button, type ‘cmd’, right-click Command Prompt’s icon and click  ’Run as administrator’. Make sure to click on ‘Yes’ on the User Account Control (UAC) window if it pops up.

Now copy the following command exactly as it appears:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="YouTubePerformanceHack" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes

• Right-click anywhere in the Command Prompt window and click ‘Paste’. (CTRL+C and CTRL+V do not work in Command Prompt.)

• Press Enter to execute the command. If everything goes well, you should get an ‘Ok.’ response, 

Now, go ahead and load a YouTube video in your browser. You should see significantly improved buffering performance. I was successfully able to stream videos in 480p resolution without any hiccups after implementing this hack. As a matter of fact, 720p videos that were completely out of reach for me also work now, albeit with a little buffering.

So, how and why does this command work? Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throttle downloads from servers that host cached videos, such those by YouTube. Running this command forces YouTube’s servers to push the video to you directly instead of the cached version, bypassing your ISP’s throttling.

Since this command blocks a massive range of IP addresses belonging to Google and XO’s content delivery network, it may cause issues with connecting to some random website in the future that uses these IP addresses. With that in mind, you can easily remove Ribar’s hack by running the following command in command prompt again:

netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="YouTubePerformanceHack"

Go ahead and try it out on your Windows PC. Don’t forget to let us know how it works for you.