i didn't used to have a problem with streaming video on the likes of youtube and freecaster but recently it has become a very frustrating experience. It seems as if the video player assumes i have a faster connection than i do. The player will buffer, play a bit, pause and then buffer a bit more. Speestest indicates no change in my connection speed:

I thought browsers/flash video players were download speed aware?

Is there anything i can do to rectify this? I experience the same using Firefox, IE and the IE tab plugin for firefox.

Blimey, you have a painfully slow connection.

All I can suggest is that you pause the video when it starts, wait for a decent amount to buffer up and then start playing it.

live in a small village. I'm actually getting twice what my line survey states is possible.

i do the pause and wait thing but some flash players don't buffer whilst paused (Freecaster)

It's possibly just that whoever you're watching has upped the speed, as 99% of broadband users have significantly faster connections than that.

BBC iPlayer has a 'low quality' mode, but it is probably not that low.

The other thing to be sure about is if you have a wifi router, check that it is still slow if you plug in via a cable, rather than over the wifi, although that is a long shot given your broadband speed.

Joe

if it was the router would it cause slow transfer from my NAS drive as well though?

I may not be an issue with buffering. Maybe some of the videos have more than 0.5Mb/s bitrate (not unlikely). If that's the case you'll never get smooth play if the file won't download while paused.

edit: I just checked a random youtube vid and it downloaded at about 1Mb/s…..

but previously youtube always buffered enough to allow the player to lag behind enough to play most of the video before it caught up. now i'm, lucky if i get 10 seconds at a time. maybe they have just adjusted the assumed minimum speed like you say. i thought they adjusted to what your connection was but maybe i was wrong

A couple of points to note. No matter how slow your router is in teh scheme of things, it'll be a damn sight faster than your broadband line unless you're over a dodgy wireless link too.

0.5 meg line is quite honestly shocking. You could bearly get streaming decent quality audio at that rate, let alone video. You need to have it saving/buffering.

However I would see if it's any better at other times of the day, i.e. 3am. If it is I'd suggest your ISP may be either overcrowded on your local exchange and/or traffic shaping – i.e. limiting certain types of traffic to prioritise others. Tiscali almost completely block torrents at any time of the day, but if I tunnel them through an SSH connection to my parents BT address I get fairly respectable speeds.

I use Zen for my broadband, which is "up to" 8mb. I get near that when speed testing, but I also notice the problem mrmichaelwright describes. When watching the world champs replay on Freecaster earlier this week I had the same 10 secs OK then a couple of secs pause. Oddly, 10/15 minutes of this and it seemed to sort itself out.

. Oddly, 10/15 minutes of this and it seemed to sort itself out.

You have more patience than I do!

and me! trying to watch the same video i stopped after 2 minutes just before the laptop got treated like a frisby

I was determined to get to Peaty's run and, since I was trying to feed two small boys at the same time, had my "incredible patience" setting activated