soft of soft

YouTube Center for Firefox lets you use YouTube in the most efficient way, with lots of features which greatly enhance your user experience, including a feature to prevent buffer blocking.

YouTube is a streaming service, so until a short while ago, to avoid interruptions during viewing, you would have to pause the video to let it buffer and load completely before being able to watch it without pauses and interruptions.

YouTube, however, has recently changed its streaming system. The new Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) no longer allows this "trick", since it only loads individual "blocks" of streaming at a time. As a result, pausing a video will only load the corresponding block and not the whole video.

This is a significant problem for those who love streaming videos on YouTube but have a slow connection. It can be solved, however, using YouTube Center for Firefox.

YouTube Center offers a lot of functionality. The main one, as we've just mentioned, is the ability to go back to the old buffer system and load the entire video by pausing the player.

The plugin also adds some features to the player, including: the ability to change the aspect ratio of the video (4:3, 16:9, 24:10), the use of a repeat button, resize functions for the player, and a button to dim all other content on the screen so that you can focus your attention solely on the video.

YouTube Center also includes functions to change skins and colors of the player, enable / disable annotations (the interactive popups that sometimes appear on the video) and remove banners, watermarks and ads. It also offers features to auto-expand the description of the video and the ability to see the maximum resolution from the preview (thumbnail) and the likes / dislikes for the video.

Next to the login button, you'll find a gear icon which gives you access to the YouTube Center control panel. There you'll find a multitude of options to modify your user experience on YouTube. The features are divided into categories. For those who are a little more technically-minded, there is a redirect to the manufacturer's website that explains the features briefly.

The YouTube Center plugin is truly amazing. It dramatically improves the user experience of the video portal and lets you change every aspect of YouTube according to your needs.

Among the many functions available with the extension, the most interesting is the one that allows you to restore the old buffer system for loading. In short, it's an essential plugin for those who spend hours on YouTube.