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. In this article I’ll go over a few common reasons for this and help you understand why they’re affecting you.
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 free of problems. Try playing a DVD or video off a CD to test the problem. 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.
Dialup is no better at playing videos online than straws are for filling swimming pools.
Maybe you could do it’s but it’s sure going to take a long time if it works at all.
3) If lots of people visit a site at once, it can temporarily bog it down.
A bit like someone trying to walk, chew gum, and send a text all at the same time.
4) The website wasn’t overloaded, but there was temporary Internet speedbump either in your neighborhood, or somewhere out there betwen you and the site.
This is like when the highway is so jammed with traffic you’re going far below the speed limit. A highway and the Internet are very similar in a lot of ways.
These last two usually clear up 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 as 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.
Maybe you’ll have a better understanding of why this happens and what to do in the future. Learning computer basics doesn’t have to be all that much of a pain with the right computer training.
