Is it possible to have lag inside a YouTube video stream? By "inside", I mean the stream itself is not lagging but the content has a lag inside of it. I suppose this could only only happen if the stream was being redirected and re-encoded somehow. In other words lets say the video is on a server in San Francisco, and a user in New York is requesting it. If the stream is first sent to, say, Chicago, and is then re-encoded in Chicago and there is lag between San Francisco and Chicago, then the resulting stream would have the lag built into it.
The reason this is coming up is that I recently got software to download YouTube videos in the expectation that I could eliminate buffering and lag problems by doing that, but when I watched the downloaded video, it still had the lag in it! (When YouTube lags, the video stops and spinning circle thing appears in the center)