How to stop YouTube sucking (Windows guide)

win-broken

My first blog post in three years has been a crazy ride. It blew up all over the web, and I’m humbled. A big thanks to everyone from HackerNews, Reddit, and most recently YouTube. Really glad this helped a lot of you guys.

The biggest question I’ve had so far is “how can I get this to work on Windiows?”, and I am back to answer that. I’ve written a guide how to block the CDN IP ranges from the command prompt on Windows, so it should work on all versions (Windows 7, Windows XP, and others). That said, I run a Mac as my primary computer and I welcome any feedback from the Windows gurus out there.

Just like yesterday’s post, you will have blazingly fast Youtube streaming (and Twitch.tv) by running a few commands to reject certain IP addresses. Also, remember that this will cause the stream to take 1-2 seconds to start because of the IP block handling, but then you are greeted with a silky smooth, ultra fast experience.

Enough talking. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Click the Start button, type “cmd”, and right click the icon to ‘Run As Administrator’ (Screenshot 1)
  2. You will likely see a UAC prompt, hit “Yes” (Screenshot 2)
  3. The command prompt window will open, this is where you will type in the commands to set your firewall rules (Screenshot 3)
  4. Enter the following command and hit Enter. If it works, you should see a big “OK”.

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="MITCHRIBARYTUBE" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes

Rules can be easily removed too. Just get back into the command prompt in the same way and run this command, hit Enter again:

netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="MITCHRIBARYTUBE"

Did this trick work for you? Let me know in the comments below, Windows users!

EDIT (Feb 27, 2013): I’ve updated the blog with a new add rule command that’s lets you use one line instead of two. Thanks to Darren for the tip!

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205 Comments How to stop YouTube sucking (Windows guide)

  1. Enzo

    Hi all, tested from Madrid (Spain) and it works perfectly, the videos load fast and do not stop, you see one pass without interruption.
    Great job.

    PS: just a question, you can deploy this solution via web? for example, a website with embedded YouTube videos with this solution that cargen visitors without having to include the code in your pc cmd.exe?

    Reply
  2. adronomics

    Hi! I’m Canadian and this works very well. I experienced a substantial increase in my video loadings. It actually loads all the way instead of just loading 1/8 at a time. Thank you very much. =D

    Reply