How to stop YouTube sucking on Ubuntu/Linux

Recently I've noticed that YouTube's performance on my machines have been terrible. It's constantly buffering, or it will stop randomly in the middle of a video. I'll get a few seconds of playback and then 10-30 seconds of buffering. It's pretty terrible. On Windows I have been able to use the helpful workaround from here and performance has definitely increased. On top of that, I'm also using the SmartVideo plugin on Chrome (it's also available for FireFox). But on my Linux boxes, I'm still having the same problem in spite of having the SmartVideo plugin. There is a Linux alternative to guide from above, but it uses ipfw program which is not natively available on Ubuntu/Linux (at least from my understanding) due to it being a BSD program. I didn't want to compile it and install it from source, so I decided to use ufw instead, which is the "Uncomplicated Firewall" that comes with Ubuntu. It was pretty simple to convert the rules over. But first you will need to enable it (if you haven't already). You can do that with:

sudo ufw enable

Then you can enable logging also, if you want:

sudo ufw logging on

If you SSH into your machine or if you use your machine as a webserver, you will need to enable a few more rules:

sudo ufw allow ssh/tcp
 sudo ufw allow http/tcp
 sudo ufw allow 8080/tcp

And of course, you can add the rules that will prevent your ISP from caching YouTube:

sudo ufw deny from 173.194.55.0/24
 sudo ufw deny from 206.111.0.0/16

You can then use ufw status to verify that your rules are in place:

$ sudo ufw status
Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
22/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
8080/tcp                   ALLOW       Anywhere
Anywhere                   DENY        173.194.55.0/24
Anywhere                   DENY        206.111.0.0/16
22/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
8080/tcp                   ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)