TV and Internet Providers

Wanting to find answers for your computer questions is to be expected. One question that comes up is why a video they’re trying to watch on a website won’t play smoothly. You’ll get some ideas of why this is, and what you can do about it in this article.

Reasons a video on a website may “stutter” or stop-and-go when playing:

1) Your computer is too old, or too slow for a different reason (like a virus, not enough memory, etc.) to play the video without glitches. One way to test this is to try playing a video you’ve downloaded or that you play off a CD or DVD. If it plays smoothly from a local file then the problem lies outside of the computer, if the local file has the same problem, it’s your computer.

2) Your Internet connection is too slow, especially if you’re using dialup access, which is incredibly slow compared to modern “broadband”, and is just not suited to watching videos online but doesn’t matter for videos playing from a DVD for example, since that’s coming from your DVD drive, not the Internet.

Would you want to fill a swimming pool with a straw? That’s what dialup is like.

Maybe you could do it’s but it’s sure going to take a long time if it works at all.

3) Maybe the site was trying to deal with a large number of people at once and couldn’t keep up.

A bit like someone trying to walk, chew gum, and look something up online all at the same time.

4) The website wasn’t overloaded, but there was Internet congestion either in your neighborhood, or somewhere between you and the website.

This is like rush hour – bumper to bumper traffic moving at a crawl. There’s really a lot of similarities between a highway and the Internet.

You can “fix” the last two by just waiting and coming back later.

Another trick that can work in a lot of situations is to click the pause button on the video: looks like the pause button on your VCR, DVD or Blu-Ray player remote — a pair of vertical lines like ~~

After you pause it, wait for the progress bar at the bottom of the video to move along a short distance while it loads more of the video (this is called “buffering”) then unpause it once it’s gotten a good distance along the bottom of the video.

Hopefully these suggestions will help you understand what might be going on if this happens to you, and give you a few ideas of what you might be able to do if it does. Learning computer basics doesn’t have to be all that much of a cause for confusion with the right basic computer training.