Why does my YouTube app have performance problems and outright failures? I have a stock Captivate on AT&amp;T.  I've tried to watch videos at least a dozen times, and maybe twice it's worked as I would like it to.

Problems include:


"This video cannot be played".  I saw the question about "allow mobile playback" flag, but I get it on user-created stuff too (not just commercial stuff).  Is there a way to check if the flag is set, say from the desktop web interface?
20+ second load time before playback starts, even for short videos, if it works at all
Sometimes I wait over a minute and the "spinner" ("Loading video") never goes away 
Once it starts playback, if the buffer runs out, I can't get it to start again.  The buffer indicator might start growing again (pale red line appears again and gets bigger) but nothing I do can make it start actually playing.  I hit play/pause, scan forward/backward, tap the time bar, etc; nothing happens.


Some notes:


I have tried HQ and not-HQ; both have issues though HQ is worse (not surprising)
I have tried it on WiFi and 3G; 3G actually seems a little better
I can watch YouTube just fine on my laptop, etc, over the same wifi connection
I have used the wifi analyzer app (forgot the name) to inspect spectrum; there are no conflicting / overlapping networks in my area
I can download podcasts on Listen at ~10+ MB/min (estimated by my watch) so it's not something wonky with my wifi connection
I've rooted the phone but only so I could fix a corrupt wifi settings file  (known issue, but I'm having trouble finding a ref link right now).  I'm pretty sure the issue is not related, and I'm not running any other superuser stuff.


I'm at a loss.  I have no idea how to track this down -- there's no particular error to look up, just general crappiness.  Is it just me?  Does everybody have this terrible of an experience?  Would the "lag fix" do anything for me?  Is there a better 3rd-party player? (someone mentioned sideloading VLC)

I don't view a lot of YouTube videos generally, but when I do get a chance to look at them it'd be nice to be able to do so on my "super" phone...
Maybe it's not the whole answer but two things seem to have made a big difference:

One, my Captivate was recently upgraded to  Froyo officially. The new Youtube app seems to perform remarkably better.

Two, and this is the really interesting bit, I switched from WPA on 802.11g to WPA2 on 802.11n, and my wifi speeds went from ~200-300k to 4-5M. Not sure exactly why but it's definitely something to consider if you see performance problems in an app that relies on the network...