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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)

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  • Might help to specify which software you are using. If the software is doing a real-time capture of the stream then it's going to lag just the same way watching it real time would lag.
    – Appleoddity
    Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 15:07

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Yes and no.

Streams should not be re-encoded between servers, but rather being copied. Encoding is a one-time phrase. Otherwise the quality would degrade with each re-encoding.

That said, it is likely your connection to the server you are streaming from is lagging or your internet connection itself or even your CPU. Especially if you are on a high-quality stream and your CPU can't keep up, it will appear as lag too.

But, that said, I have actually seen someone upload a video to youtube of a show that they recorded off of their cable and they got lag, so the show itself gave this circle, and it was in the recording. You can test this by pausing the show. If the circle stops spinning, its in the recording. If it doesn't stop spinning or disappears completely, its a connection issue.

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  • Yes, that is exactly the problem. I tested the video the way you suggested and it froze the circle, so it means the lag was on the machine of the idiot streamer who made the video, not on my machine. Thanks for the idea.
    – Tyler Durden
    Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 17:19
  • Yes, so the person who recorded the video may just have used a video camera to record his tv and uploaded that. Not the first time I see that. If this helped you, please accept the answer, so other people know you no longer need help.
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 17:38
  • Since you have not bothered to extend the courtesy of voting for my question, I am not inclined to vote for yours either.
    – Tyler Durden
    Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 22:16
  • @TylerDurden I never said anything about voting. I said about marking it solved, so others know you no longer need help. In respect to the voting. I was on a hurry and simply forgot, but now with this attitude, I won't vote.
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 22, 2017 at 10:40

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