Stuttering?

[peachy51]

thanks to all who reply in advance>>>> my question is on you tube when i wanna play something it plays then stops plays then stops and so on, why wont it play continuous? thnx

[ryepie]

What Youtube, and many other online media sites, do is start playing the video before it has fully cached itself on your computer. You will have noticed a red progress bar on the video slider, this represents the amount of video that has actually been buffered. Now the reason why this happens is that in theory it should still provide you with a seamless viewing experience by the video player detecting the rate at which the video file is downloading and the length of the video. With these two pieces of information it is trivial to work out how long it will take to download the file and as such how long to suspend playback up to a point, where once playback starts it will not reach the end of the file that has been buffered so far.

Of course in the real world your network speed is never constant. Often, local variations of speed on your computer, speed variations on your ISP and speed variations at the third party providing the content all add up to the calculation of download time to being less accurate than is desirable. The calculation is constantly being revised as the video downloads but if the network speed varies enough then you will unfortunately get stop/start playback!