How to speed up YouTube player on Android?

Nothing is more annoying than seeing that little loading bar for ages and waiting till the video finally loads. Well, not anymore! Here's a handy walkthrough of how to speed up YouTube on Android by enabling the ExoPlayer!

Root required

Alright, let's get to it!

Firstly, head over to the Youtube app settings and force stop it. You can also clear its data to avoid possible problems.
Download/open a root browser and navigate to /data/data/com.google.android.youtube.
Open the file called shared_prefs
Now, open the youtube.xml in a text editor of the app you're using.
There's a <map> element right after the <xml version>and encoding information.

Copy these lines and past them below the <map> tag.

<string name="exo_player_activation_type">ADAPTIVE</string>

<boolean name="exo_player_cache" value="true"/>

<boolean name="show_exo_player_debzg_messages" value="true"/>

Be sure to save the file. Then go back to Youtube app settings and force close it again to take the effect. And you're done!

A toast message "Using ExoPlayer" should appear if you attempt to play a video on YouTube. That way you'll know the ExoPlayer fully works. Buffering especially HD/FULLHD videos should be much faster than before. Feel free to leave a feedback!

[source]

Be sure to have at least youtube,xml file backup before editing system files.