Often when playing a track from You Tube, the video and music “hang” and then restart as though it has had an interruption in loading. However if you replay the track this doesn’t happen- I assume as it is stored in a temp file somewhere.
However, I have sufficient RAM I think- 2 GB- I thought You Tube would load to a buffer and play out of that. Seems like that is incorrect.
Computer experts- in pretty simple language- what does happen?
I think it could be a couple of things:
-Bandwidth being hogged by other content - at the same time as loading/caching the video, it may also be loading other stuff on the page - ad banners - especially Flash-based ones - are a culprit for this.
-In the case of videos stalling after the page has fully loaded, it might just be that the algorithm that works out how much it needs to cache before starting to play, is a little too optimistic, or has been hoodwinked into miscalculation by some other factor, such as browser prefetching, or a temporary sweet spot in your communications bandwidth, or just insufficient information to properly calculate the projected download time.
Projections like that are often wildly inaccurate - like when you copy a bunch of files and the estimated time remaining is all over the place until it has sufficient data to make a meaningful calculation.
And yes, when you replay a video without leaving the page, it’s most likely coming from a local cache (not all online videos work like that, but many do).
Thanks. I did understand that 
Oh, thank goodness! This thread is, thankfully, not about what the title brought to mind.
I do not wish to go into your mind
I think it’s something with Youtube lately. The other night I was playing some tunes while I was working and it kept hiccuping and freezing. I know my system is fine, and Myspace video wasn’t doing it, so I blame them.
You’re not the only one who thought that.
Nope.
That poor, despondent munchkin!
I got good advice (from a similar thread here a couple month ago). A wise Doper suggested that you hit the stop/pause button as soon as the video starts to play.
Watch the red leader strip for 15 seconds as it downloads, and when you see that the leader has a good “head start”, hit the play button. As long as the redline is moving ahead of the round “slider”, then you won’t get those annoying pauses.
This all depends on a steady stream of bits from the server. The video player has this functionality built in, but it can’t be sure that the projected load time will remain constant, and neither can you. If the server hangs while streaming the video, you will hang eventually as well.
If you watch the load indicator, the media player will wait until a buffer of video has built up before starting to play it again. If it sees a bunch of data arriving quickly it will assume that is the rate that it will continue to arrive, and start up sooner. If it arrives very slowly, it will wait until enough has accumulated so that it can run all the way to completion without running out. But the 'net is a harsh mistress, and delays can happen anywhere.