How To Get YouTube Videos to Play Smoothly in Google Chrome

For some reason, Google Chrome doesn’t seem to like YouTube videos, regardless of whether you play them on the YouTube site or embedded in another site like Facebook. I first noticed this on a low-spec netbook, so I thought maybe it was a problem with the graphics card. Then, I noticed it on another computer that had a better graphics card, so I thought maybe it was my wireless connection. However, I finally figured out that it was not a problem with the graphics card or the network, but with my browser (Chrome).

Here is a quick fix that should work to get rid of the choppy playback.

  1. In the address bar, type “about:plugins“.
  2. In the top right hand corner of your screen, you should see something that looks like “+Details“. Click on it to see more details about the plugins.
  3. Under Adobe Flash Player, you should see one file called “pepflashplayer.dll“. (The full path will be something like this:
    C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\23.0.1271.64\PepperFlash\pepflashplayer.dll)
  4. Disable this file by clicking on the blue word “Disable“.
  5. Close Chrome and open it again. Test out your video and be wowed by the non-choppiness!