Streaming Choppy Video

[heycoa]

Hello all,
Kind of an odd question (hopefully an easy one). I am trying to stream videos of a show online and the playback becomes choppy after several episodes. Im running windows 7 with 8 gigs ddr3 ram, cpu is a quad core phenom at 3.2GHz, any my graphics card is a nvidia gt9800 1Gb gddr3. Im running DSL wired to my PC at around 10-12Mbs.

I would use Ccleaner to clear out the internet cache and it helps but only for a little while. Then it reverts back to being choppy and additional uses of Ccleaner cease to help. Even restarting my computer isn't fixing the problem for as long as it used to.

Any advise? Do i need a more powerful graphics card? Or are there some simple tweaks that will subdue the issue?

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you
-steve

 

[cl-scott]

When dealing with streaming media, pretty much the one and only thing that has any kind of impact will be the Internet connection. So start looking at, and closing, any other program(s) you have running that use the Internet as well.

 

[heycoa]

Well that's the odd thing. Only one firefox browser will be open and solely dedicated to the video.

 

[Alabalcho]

Is it just the video which slows down? Have you tried downloading a regular file after "playback becomes choppy"?

There is a chance your ISP just throtles you down after he sees you're eating bandwith like there's no tomorrow

 

[smorizio]

check your flash settings...for the amount of space an ap can use on your hard drive. set it to unlimited. also try in the flash windows turn off hardware acceleration...some version of flash and nvidia drivers were buggy. also check that your flash is up to date as is firefox. if these are large or long movies your better off hitting the pause button and grabbing a soda and wait 5-10 min for the computer and flash to buffer the movie. one thing also to check is the age of your video and audio plug ins. a lot of the video on the internet is compressed and you need to keep up with the plugs in.

 

[heycoa]

This is all great advice and I thought I should quickly clarify: The playback is choppy even when the video is fully preloaded. I do wait for the player to finish loading until just about the very end and then I hit play.

Also, smorizio, how would i go about dedicating the ap space on my flash settings? I am not familiar with tweaking flash's settings as I've never done it before.

Again, thank you for your time all!

 

[Hawkeye22]

Flash player settings can be found in the windows control panel.

 

[smorizio]

when the last time you updated your dvix or your quicktime?? if the video looks to be preloaded to your desktop then it may be a old plug ins.
http://www.divx.com/

 

[heycoa]

Well i cannot update my divix because one of the websites i use to stream wont allow a new version but if it makes the difference then i guess i will have to update.

 

[heycoa]

Best answer selected by heycoa.

 

[Eastcider]

Hello, I found a simple and rather obvious cause, it was only my fault:

I had changed the setting in the "Internet Options" where at the top of the "Advanced " tab because I had wanted to test the "Accelerated Graphics" setting to see if it was any better: Well.. it wasn't.

>>> Simply uncheck the box that says "Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering", and PRESTO! Fixed! <<<

For my PC it caused (every) video to be really choppy for whatever reason, so putting it back to an empty check box fixed the problem INSTANTLY! I forgot that I had changed it causing alot of frustration until I remembered to turn it back again.
I have lots of video to catch up with now, so enjoy & I really hope I've helped!
Cheers!

 

[Jorge_48]

I'm running a i7 with 32 gigs of ram and was supprize to find myself with this issue. I when to System Properties --> Performance Options -->Visual Effect tab and selected Custom and unchecked Enable desktop composition to fix my issue.