Who do I blame for lousy streaming?

Nada666

Lousy streaming experience and no longer able to browse the Web at the same time without additional hiccoughing.

The BBC for over-zealous security checks? Or have they switched to more concentrated encoding that needs a more powerful processor to decode?

Microsoft for their trashy Silverlight or Adobe for just as bad Flash?

Mozilla for Firefox?

My broadband provider?

Me for trying to eke out another couple of years from this ageing laptop?

Radio streams (never mind television) now take tens of seconds to start (that is when they do). Televison streams take tens of seconds for anything to happen - moving to full-screen (or even just trying to adjust the volume!)

Netflix is almost (but not quite) as bad as the BBC. Not tried commercial channel streams because I can not be the proverbial with more than two minutes of adverts.

enfield_freddy

borrow/try another computer


1: streaming works
2: streaming is still bad


1) your computer is faulty/to old
2) your internet provider needs talking to


the list of faults could be long and sometimes easy to fix ,


however try to resolve the above problem first


PS , I stream full length feature films on a arm 700 processor and 512m of memory , that spec is probably lower than a 5 yr old mobile phone

teleaddict

out of curiosity, who is your broadband provider?

mgdavid

and what speed bb service are you paying for, and what speed does speedtest.net show up?
And what other devices are sharing your wifi / router?

GrumpyPL

Do you only experience problems streaming? Any problems playing downloaded video? This could indicate a video card error/problem which would be a hardware fault. Sounds to me to be an internet speed issue, although aging laptops can cause the same "symptoms" as such.

esuhl

Have you run a speed test?
http://www.speedtest.net/

If you have decent speeds, you might be able to adjust the QoS (Quality of Service) settings in your router, which allow you to set the priority of network traffic (so, for example, streamed video is given priority over web browsing).

paddyrg

The BBC's CDN is more than capable, so the fault is either in your provider or more likely computer. Silverlight is fine in itself, but irrelevant and not used by the Beeb (or practically anyone any more). Flash has always been crufty, but is available cross platform and works just fine for the vast majority of people.

Computers fill up with rubbish, WiFi gets contended, etc. If you're using WiFi, try plugging in. If that's the same, try different devices.

bod1467

Does OP have Tesco broadband and is paying a premium for it?

(See OP's recent posts).

Strider590

What people don't understand is that the internet is not just a stream of data flowing at one speed, your ISP can and often will limit your bandwidth to certain websites and services.

For example, Youtube has caching servers around the globe, which take the strain from the main server. Some of these servers are low bandwidth, designed for corporate IT managers to reduce the effect of staff using Youtube at work, but the ISPs have started redirecting Youtube traffic to these "slow" servers too, because they typically have more subscribers than they have wholesale bandwidth, so many people find Youtube videos won't stream or will stream the first 10s and then stop. But if you block the "slow" server using your router, you can suddenly watch Youtube with no problem at all.

The same is being done to catchup/internet TV services, they're capping bandwidth because they're over subscribed, twice as many passengers as the bus can handle, so to speak......