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For 1, there might be settings that can help.

I used to use mplayer(of which mpv is a fork) to watch pirate streams of premier league games several years ago, via acestream. Since this was live, lag was a real issue; you can't buffer ahead when there's nothing to buffer yet. Eventually I figured out that mplayer had settings to do things like buffer for 2 minutes at the beginning of the stream before playing. You could also configure it by megabytes pre-buffered. This solved my lag issues very neatly. I can't remember what the settings were, it's been a long time and I don't have those config files anymore. But it should all be in the docs somewhere.

Try setting `ytdl-format=ytdl` in `mpv.conf`, that fixed it for me.

> 1. Although `yt-dlp` consistently is able to download videos at link speed (even when the said link is in multi-gig range!), streaming the video through `mpv` will not work as well and some videos would buffer every couple chunks. But that was in the past…

I still get this with YouTube from time to time. Works with some videos, others are unwatchable. Seeking also generally seems broke and is often slower than downloading even the whole video.

I think the issue with buffering on some videos is because of bad DASH support https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7033