YouTube still freezes for me sometimes. It will play the video but I can't do anything else - no on-screen controls, home button doesn't work so I have to hold power until it reboots.
When I first upgraded to 4.1.2 videos that I'd recorded also stuttered, but doing that battery drain thing fixed that. I'm sure Youtube never used to do that, so I'm wondering if it's the recent versino of the app that is causing it. I might uninstall updates and see how that goes.