Youtube automatically changes video quality to 240p

[Shard.K]

I am a frequent user of YouTube. I upload my own movies, watch several videos and do lot more things. It been over a week i started getting a problem with video playback, not sure if it is with just me or other people also facing the problem. Whenever i play any video, it starts in 240p video quality instead of the standard 360p or higher. I have to manually set it again to 360 and start reloading from beginning which is time consuming and obviously bandwidth consuming.

Again if i play any video from the suggested clips at the end of any video, it starts in 240 which i need to change manually again to 360. This is very annoying. Can anyone please tell me what is wrong? Does this happens with all of you? I tried changing browsers but the problem remains the same. Please provide me a permanent fix for the same. Thank you.

[The-Apollo]

Well, i too am a frequent youtube visitor but i didn;t noticed any such silly thing. All my videos start at 360p unless and until i select the option "Never Play High Quality Video". So two things to check for you. First, see if you have not marked that option. And second Which browser you are using? I am on Chrome and youtube works fine.

[Shard.K]

So two things to check for you. First, see if you have not marked that option. And second Which browser you are using? I am on Chrome and youtube works fine.

Well, i am using YouTube since long years and i cannot do such foolishness. I haven't marked to play all my videos on 240p. Secondly, i am using Mozilla Firefox. How does it matters? Isn't YouTube made for firefox?

Please provide some working solution.

[Maq.H]

Of course Firefox doesn’t matters in this problem unless and until you have installed the Flash Player plugin. Anyways, here is what you need to do. Open Youtube, go to Youtube settings, click on PlayBack from the left pane and mark the following options as shown in the image:

Once you do this, all your videos will start playing in high quality or HD videos by default. No more 240p videos. Hope it helps.

[Knowle]

As far as I know buffering videos online or downloading them on the desktop consumes the same amount of bandwidth. Hence what I do is simply download the videos and watch them in any media player without any stupid buffer or something. That’s the best way to get rid of buffering issues.

[Shard.K]

Anyways, here is what you need to do. Open Youtube, go to Youtube settings, click on PlayBack from the left pane and mark the following options as shown in the image:

Thank you very much for the help Maq.h. That was exactly what I was looking for. I set the option to play high quality videos by default and the problem gone away. Help appreciated.