video stops and starts. computer question

Sounds right, this is very low for internet video and as bandwidth is increasing (though Australia lags here) the videos are getting bigger and heavier as well. But even if your speed is good enough sometimes the video site is slow, or there is other congestion. There are many times I just have to pause the video and let it keep loading if I want to see it uninterrupted and I have about 6x that speed (which is still agonizingly slow compared to what my American friends have, which is still agonizingly slow compared to what Japanese have....) so it might not be something you can always fix.



The auto options often do poorly at lower speeds and many times these days sites just don't scale down low enough. As bandwidth gets cheaper and faster the smallest video size available is going higher and higher. That site still offers such options but it's going to be less common going forward (maybe Australian sites will lag due to the frustrating bandwidth issues there).



I notice a lot of people feeling the same way in my online readings and my experience is similar. I think some sites may be slowing down (I see a lot of accusations that Youtube is slower) but it could also be ISPs intentionally throttling types of traffic (which is what the whole "Net Neutrality" debate in the US is about).



It can cause choppy video but not choppy video that is choppy because of the downloading. So if it is doing this even if the video is fully downloaded then it might be the computer's local resources (I consider this unlikely) but what you describe sounds like a simple matter of a big video going through a small pipe.




Not really, they need to have lower quality versions of their videos available for anything to work. I suggest doing what I often do, and start the video, immediately pause it and leave it there in a background tab for a while to buffer before starting it.

thanks robert you have confirmed my suspicions. more high def video available than a few years ago and site congestion.

BTW higher bandwidth is available here in oz. it comes at a cost though which, i feel, is unreasonable. it seems to me that higher bandwidth has the same cost basis as lower bandwidth. it costs the isp/ service providor no more to provide high speed than it does to provide low speed (up to the point where new cables need to be laid)