How to Pause Auto Buffering of YouTube Videos

When you hit the Play button in a YouTube video page, the entire video starts buffering in the background. After a while, you may realize that the video isn’t interesting or may be you have to attend a phone call. You hit the “pause” button but the video continues to download in the background.

There are some problems with the auto download or buffering of YouTube videos. Some videos may have a loud audio sound after a couple of minutes so if you leave your computer desk after hitting the “Play” button and the video continues to download, the loud audio sound can embarrass you in office or meetings. Some videos might also have vulgar content so your kids may get exposed to unsafe content while the video was buffering and you were not sure what the video was all about

If you are using a limited internet browsing plan, the auto buffering of YouTube videos may consume additional resources and thus may result in high broadband bills. You can use this following trick to pause or stop auto buffering of YouTube videos to save internet bandwidth.

Whenever a video starts to play, right click on the player timeline, shown in red and select ” Stop Download”. The video buffering will stop and you can resume it later on, when you really want it. (also see: YouTube URL Tips and Tricks)

Stop auto buffering of YouTube videos

The alternative may be to close the tab but this feature comes in handy when you want to watch the video later on without buffering it all the way, thus causing increased internet usage. Note that this trick is also applicable for Google Videos.

Another thing I have noticed regarding YouTube videos is that once the video has completely buffered, the brpwser still retains a cached copy of the video which can be played without buffering after you have closed the browser tab. Let’s say you were watching 2 YouTube videos and closed the browser tab or navigated away from the video page. After some time, you wish to watch that video again but the problem is that the video is very long in length and you don’t want to buffer it all over again.

No problems – simply open the video link in a new browser tab or window and there you have it. The video will appear completely buffered and you can watch the video without having to download it in the first place. Note that this method holds true only when you have not cleared your browser cookies or browser cache. The same holds true when you want to  stop YouTube videos from autoplaying.