RE: Video streaming

[printerman]

Hi,
wondering if anyone can help. I've been trying to use media player to watch streamed tv content but no matter how i set my settings i always seem to get a buffer under-run. I've tried upping the buffer content time in increments from 5 secs to 60 secs. It helped a little bit but it still started jumping after a few minutes and ran out of stored data. I also changed my connection type from 'detect' to 'cable/dsl 256kbps'. Seemed to be worse! I'm not sure if a proxy server would help, but again i'm not too sure about setting this up correctly. Can anyone help?
My spec AMD 2400+ (2ghz) 256mb, 30gb hdd, nVidia Fx5200 running win98. I have the 300k package from ntl and achieve ~35kbps on a standard day. This really is driving me mad!

[Chris W]

Try telling that you have a lower standard of connection (ie 128k or 56K) this will improve the buffer size, and may improve the situation.

TBH a 300k connection is not ideal for streaming video. What quality of video is it?

[printerman]

To be honest i don't know the qualty. But it does work for a few minutes (5 last night) then stops. Surely with automatic settings media player should know this! Anyway, your right, it never crossed my mind to drop the speed. I'll pick Dual ISDN 128k. What is the difference between DSL/Cable and Dual ISDN?
I need to pick a lower speed but DSL/Cable isn't available as an option around 150k. Does this matter.?
Also, if i switch off my sygate while recieving the stream will that help?

[SMHarman]

DSL / Cable is considered to be 512 ish. So you should select dual ISDN as this is below your b/w available.

[Shaun]

If its the BBC site your trying to stream from then I sometimes get the same problem (and I'm on a 2Mbit connection) with real player, I think its when their site is busy.

[printerman]

Will having my swap file set at 150mb have an affect rather than letting windows determine it?

[Matth]

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/stream.html - tried this?

You may also need to increase RWIN - see any general set of broadband tweaks for that.

[printerman]

Thanks for the links chaps. I'll have a read of the rwin info. The stream i'm trying to view is 150kbps. So my connection should be fine shouldn't it? (300k is 300kbps?)
Thanks again.

[SMHarman]

It should, depending on where the stream comes from network congestion can also play a big part though.

[Graham M]

U.S. sites are not ideal when streaming to the UK.

[printerman]

Hi, Back again! I've used am RWIN patch from dslreports which has helped alot. The stream is running at 134kbps and i'm on 300k. The sound is excellent. I've also tried different buffer settings and they seem best low down like 2seconds!! I'm still getting video frames in 3 second snapshots though. Any more thoughts?