Video's get better, harder to stream

Online video from news web sites such as Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN have dramatically increased the quality of the video they offer.  Other web sites such You Tube, Dallas Cowboys, and the many fan web sites for College sports have also increased the quality of the video they offer.  Individual video file size has mushroomed into the 20Mb range for even short 3 minute video clips.  These video's look near TV quality when made full screen on your average 19" flat screen computer monitor.

To watch such a video real time requires an 800K steady connection which is capable of downloading constantly at 112 kb/s.  If this download speed is not available, the video will stop playing, it will download some video in the background (BUFFERING), and then start again.

A dedicated T1 (1500K capable of constant download at 187 kb/s) would be able to stream such a video.  By contrast, dial up connections communicate at 53K maximum with a practical 5 kb/s maximum download capability.  So one can get 20Mb (video or any file) in  a little of an hour if one has a perfect dialup connection, and optimized computer, and is not doing anything else through the Internet while downloading.  The average dialup connection downloads at 3 kb/s or less, so this video could easily take over 2 hours.  Add in virus scanning software overhead loaded on many home computers, and this video becomes impossible to download through dialup.

281.COM is exploring increased bandwidth for it's Mach and Warp high speed Internet customers.  We are aware that many of our customers want to watch video's online like their friends and relatives in larger cities are doing.  Currently, the 281 network is optimized for low bandwidth streams such as VOIP and VPN (Voice over Internet Protocol and Virtual Private Networks).  High bandwidth streams such as these large video's and other file transfers are slowed down whenever total bandwidth by 281 customers reaches 65% of the total available bandwidth.  This prevents any single customer, or group of customers, from consuming all available bandwidth which would prevent all other customers from completing VOIP and VPN connections, or even opening web sites or checking E-mail.

What can you do?  If you want to watch these video's without constant buffering, you need to buffer the entire video (download it) before you start watching.

Some of these web sites such as You Tube make this easy.  Just hit pause, and the video continues to download (see the faint download line run across).  Other sites, you have to let the video play all the way through choppy, and then when it is done, just hit the play button and it plays all the way through again without interruption because the whole video is already on your computer.  HINT:  Open the video in a new window and let it play with your speakers muted while you do other things like check E-mail.  When you go back to it later, just hit the play button (usually an arrow) and it will start over playing all the way through now.

I have run into a several sites with customers that do not allow you to do either of these methods.  These are typically using Adobe Flash on their web site to play the video.  You can help this by updating your Adobe Flash player, right clicking the picture, and choosing Quality and setting to medium or low.  You can many times choose a lower quality video which is fine in a window and may allow you to watch more without interruption---lower quality will make full screen watching pixelated.  Some sites use Windows Media player settings, so you can adjust these in Windows Media player.

Subscribing to Real Networks RealPlayer services or Microsoft Windows Media Player services give you access to many more video's and other content, and give you much greater capability to set how the video is watched and downloaded.  The Preferences in these video/audio programs allow you to set how much buffering will happen before the video even starts, so it will download what you tell it to before playing, so you can then watch without interruption.  I recommend RealPlayer's SuperPass with RealPlayer Plus if you want to watch a lot of video's.

Here are some helpful links to video players and sites:

Here are some popular sites offering video:  (Warning, video's obtained from these sites may contain content inappropriate for younger viewers)

By Tim Moczygemba, Moxie Services Inc.
Copyright © 2008  281 Communications Inc. All rights reserved.
Revised: September 21, 2008 .