If it's any consolation
and I imagine it's been mentioned, but Talk Talk aren't any better. Something happened a little while back with the buffering business on youtube and it just hasn't been right since. Well, in plain English, it actually does NOT buffer any more.
I have researched it. There seems to be no answer. What has worked for others does not work for me.
And many are just left with it as it is and have given up trying to fix it. It's not broke our end obviously.
I'm running it on all kinds of stuff: VMs, VPNs, Linux, Windows, not really knowing what I am doing, just experimenting, but I can fire up a browser and type in 'youtube.com' into the URI bar. I mean, you would kind of expect it not to run so smoothly on a VM running off a usb stick, but Debian on VBox running with only 3 percent space left on it, works smoother than some other installs I have...
I tell a lie, some videos do buffer. But never the one you really really wanna watch at the time.
I've tried IceWeasel, Midori, FF, Opera, Chromium, even blessed IE - same behaviour or lack of.
Sometimes I just wanna ah zig a zag ah!
iPlayer does tend to buffer better recently on Linux, but it's still hit and miss when you get that boxing compression. I mean, I got a steady 10Mbps now they have upgraded my line, but something is not right somewhere in streaming land. And other streaming services are so hit and miss that very often they don't even work at all. Maybe I'm just unlucky.