How to Stop YouTube from Sucking (DD-WRT Version)

This awesome blog post at MitchRibar.com outlined a great way to improve YouTube’s sometimes crappy load times and performance.  It works very well and I’m glad somebody took the time to share this knowledge on the internet.

His method is a local client only option, so if you have alot of computers like I do it may be a pain to set this up on every computer, phone, etc that you have.  Instead, I decided to try and block it at my router which I happened to have flashed with DD-WRT.

Here’s how you do it!

  • Log into your router’s admin interface
  • Click on “Administration” and then select the “Commands” tab
  • Paste the following lines into the commands text area:
    iptables -I FORWARD -s 173.194.55.0/24 -j DROP
    iptables -I FORWARD -s 206.111.0.0/16 -j DROP
  • Now click “Save Firewall”
  • You should now notice a firewall section with these lines added, which looks like this:
    firewall_settings

Congratulations!  You’ve now improved YouTube’s performance on your entire network.  I did this on a DD-WRT enabled router; but this could be done on any device that runs iptables.  Open-WRT, Tomato, Linux boxes, etc.  If you have ipables, give it a try!

6 thoughts on “How to Stop YouTube from Sucking (DD-WRT Version)

  1. Rene

    For some reason this doesn’t work for me. I still get the constant buffering prior to trying this tweak.

  2. Vanberge Post author

    Rene,
    Something I’ve been trying out and testing is using REJECT instead of DROP.
    Try replacing that and see what you get?

    I have not noticed a difference so far; but it was something that Mitch the original author recommended on his site.

  3. David

    This sounds like a dream come true. But, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get this to work on a Netgear WNDR3400. I’m not an idiot, at least I didn’t think I was. Help!

  4. com

    Doesn’t seem to work 🙁 tried both DROP and REJECT using dd-wrt on linksys, time warner cable in NC, still extremely bad buffering on lots of videos.

  5. com

    ok, so this may be location dependent since the problem i had was due to a different ip range, mine is 208.117.251.x, this is with TWC in NC. to find out you can use firebug and look at the GET on “videoplayback?algorithm=throttle-factor” with domain name something like “r9—sn-p5qlsm7l.c.youtube.com”. however, blocking that range renders every video unplayable, you could block individual ip addresses of slow videos but results of that are inconsistent – sometimes it would switch to a good ip, sometimes it would switch to another bad ip and give up after, and sometimes it would not attempt to switch at all rendering the video unplayable again. i’ve tried both of these methods:
    iptables -I FORWARD -s 208.117.251.172/32 -j REJECT
    iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 208.117.251.172/32 -j REJECT

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