Video playing issues

  • Thread starter Thread starter tripsovercats
  • Start date Start date
T

tripsovercats

Hi,
For awhile I could play videos with no problems, but now when I try to
play them (from Youtube for example) they stop and start and stop and
start with that circle thingy whirling when it pauses and take
forever. I tried uninstalling the adobe flash player and reinstalling
it, but that has not done anything to fix the problem. Any ideas?
Thanks.
 
Hi, tripsovercats.

It sounds like your download speed is not fast enough to stay ahead of the
player. So the player runs until the buffer is empty, then it has to wait
for more data to be downloaded. You can either Pause the player until more
of the video has been downloaded into the buffer, or get a faster
connection.

Do you have broadband, or a dial-up connection? If a cable broadband, does
the performance vary with time of day? Many cable systems share connections
among several users; when they all are online at the same time (in "prime
time"), download speeds can slow down for all of them. Since your
performance was OK "for awhile", maybe it slowed down when a new neighbor
moved in or signed up. What else might have happened between "awhile" and
"now"?

These are just generic comments. If you need something more specific,
please give us more details about your computer hardware, your Vista
version, and your Internet connection, especially its advertised speed.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
 
Hi, tripsovercats.

It sounds like your download speed is not fast enough to stay ahead of the
player.  So the player runs until the buffer is empty, then it has to wait
for more data to be downloaded.  You can either Pause the player until more
of thevideohas been downloaded into the buffer, or get a faster
connection.

Do you have broadband, or a dial-up connection?
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for your reply. I have DSL with it looks like 54 mbps. I
upgraded awhile back and it's supposed to be faster than the original
DSL plan I had. I don't understand why the videos used to work just
fine, but now everything takes forever.
If a cable broadband, does
the performance vary with time of day?  Many cable systems share connections
among several users; when they all are online at the same time (in "prime
time"), download speeds can slow down for all of them.  Since your
performance was OK "for awhile", maybe it slowed down when a new neighbor
moved in or signed up.  What else might have happened between "awhile" and
"now"?
Click to expand...

I don't know. I have this issue now regardless of the time of day. For
example, I was trying to look a vodeo even at 4:00 this morning and
still had problems.

These are just generic comments.  If you need something more specific,
please give us more details about your computer hardware, your Vista
version, and your Internet connection, especially its advertised speed.
Click to expand...

I have Windows Vista Home Basic. It looks like my system is 32 bit
(I'm a novice with this sort of thing so I hope this is the right
info.)
 
Hi, tripsovercats.

DSL should be fast enough for most YouTube and other online videos. DSL
travels over your telephone cable, not your television cable, so unless you
are on a party line (remember those?), it doesn't share bandwidth like many
cable Internet services do, so the time-of-day question shouldn't matter.

CenturyTel here advertises their DSL as "Consistently fast with 512 Kbps
speed". Grande Communications, a cable TV service provider, advertises
speeds from 1.5 Mbps to 24.0 Mbps; I have the 8.0 Mbps service. For
technical reasons (which I don't understand), actual observed speed is
seldom close to the advertised theoretical speeds. When I go to DSL Reports
(http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?flash=1) and run their speed test, it
says my actual speed to Toronto is about 2120 Kbps at this time; it
fluctuates - it was about 3500 Kbps 10 minutes ago. Let's try to Los
Angeles...Wow! 6,266 Kbps! ;<) As you may know, K is for kilo and M for
mega; bps is bits per second; Bps (with the B capitalized) is Bytes per
second, which is about 10 times as fast. Those numbers are not precise
because the computer really deals in binary numbers, not decimal, but they
are close enough for most casual conversation about speeds.

All this theory and other users' experiences don't mean much when we are
just trying to watch a video, though.

When a YouTube video is playing, we usually see a little "thermometer" bar
beneath the video. This bar is actually 2 bars in one. The brighter red
bar has a moving button showing how far we are into playing the video. The
pale red bar shows how full the buffer is. The red bar should go much
faster toward the right, showing that you have downloaded the next minute,
perhaps, of a 4-minute video, while the play button trails along, perhaps 20
seconds behind. If the play button catches up to the red bar, then the
video will have to pause until the buffer has received something more to
play.

When you are playing videos, does your buffer bar stay consistently far
ahead of the play button?

As you can tell, I'm not a techie on this subject, so maybe someone who
understands it better will jump in and educate both of us.

I have Windows Vista Home Basic. It looks like my system is 32 bit
(I'm a novice with this sort of thing so I hope this is the right
info.)

Two ways to find your Windows version; they work in WinXP, Vista, Win7 - and
just about any other version. The very quickest is to just press
<Win>+<Break>. That is, hold the Windows logo key as though it were the
<Shift> key while you press the <Pause/Break> key. Some keyboards don't
have these keys or they have different labels. So you can press Start, type
"cmd.exe" and press Enter. This opens a Command Prompt window (which many
of us veterans refer to as a "DOS window") where we can type commands on the
command line. Here, just type "winver" and press Enter.

Either of those methods should identify your Windows version, including the
Service Pack level. If you are running a 64-bit edition, the System screen
will say so; otherwise it is 32-bit. The 32-bit is still more common, I
think, but 64-bit is catching up.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
 
Woops! Replying to myself to say...

A few lines in my last post are quotes from YOUR post, but they are missing
the ">" quote indicators:
I have Windows Vista Home Basic. It looks like my system is 32 bit
(I'm a novice with this sort of thing so I hope this is the right
info.)
Click to expand...

That's your system; mine is as shown in my Sig.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
 
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