I recently logged onto YouTube to hear Edith Piaf, on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959, sing “Milord.” I’d get 2 or 3 seconds of audio, then several seconds of silence. I understand this is what is called “buffering.” Is there any way to stop it?
The reason that this occurs is that YouTube lets you start watching a video before it finishes downloading. The easiest way to avoid this problem is to just pause the video immediately and give it time to download fully.
Thanks, Grumman. However, there’s no bar graph to tell the progress of the download so the video and audio kept stopping; I had to “pause” for 3 or 4 minutes several times to get all the way through.
Yes, there is…the same bar that tells you how far in the video you are when it’s playing - it turns pink as it’s loading.
There should be a pale red line in the seeker bar that appears as it buffers, and a brighter red where the slider has progressed when it plays.
I asked the same question about a year ago. For me, it seems to depend on the taffic on the Internet. (Oh and the answers this time round are different 
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My strategy is to open a video with the volume muted, do something else while it buffers and plays through once, then turn the sound on and replay it.
Sometimes server problems make the buffering act erratically or ultra-slow. The NYC YouTube server has been doing this to me for the past couple of days.