streaming videos keep buffering

[sitlet]

hey fellas, ive been having a problem with my computer the past few weeks. i am on a high speed network through my apartment building. in the past it has been very fast, but lately im having trouble viewing streaming media. but the problem is only with streaming media, not anything else. numerous speed tests have averaged about 8000kbps down and about 1000kbps up. now, if i just download a file from the internet (ie. right click-save file as) it will download very fast, up to about 600KBps. but i cannot vew any streaming media. with you tube videos i have to wait about 2 mins before i can start watching them. same thing with myspace videos. my p2p program used to upload about 70KBps, now i cant even get 10KBps, which in turn is killing my download speed. and the main problem, i use sopcast, which lets you watch many live streaming feeds of tv channels. normally it would take about 30 secs to buffer and start playing perfectly. now, it takes about 5 mins, and it will get up to about 10% buffered and hover there +/- 5%. ive called the network techs and they say everythings fine. i have also checked every possible setting on my pc, ran spyware checks, defraged, disabled the windows firewall, etc.

i asked my friend about it and his first thoughts were my connection was slow. but its not, everything else downloads fine except streaming media. anyone have any suggestions?

[Heywould3]

one problem might be that if you are running a P2P at the same time that you are trying to watch a video you might have maxed your up load speed witch in return will throttle your dl speed. your isp might have changed your connection speeds. i use to have 6000/1024 but it got reduced to 3000/128 they are slowly returning to the old speed.. goto www.dslreports.com and do a speed check. try a few to get an average. dont just count on one. post back what the site says.

i understand that other things dl fine but do a few tests to be sure.
one last thing.. if your using a p2p set your upload speed to 80% of your max speed.. for example if your upload max is 70kbs as you said.. set it to something around 60kbs.. that will fix your throttling

i re read what you typed and i see that you have done many speed tests.. i loaded that program that you use to watch tv shows/ video and i too get buffering.. it looks like the servers might be at their max and that will cause that.. also the route to the server from your isp might also be bottlenecked. does it happen on all sites that stream videos? youtube is also busy but i dont get much buffering there after the start.

[ahhaa]

zdnet downloads recently listed a hispeed connection analyzer; sorry I don't have a link but you can search there or google it up

If it worked fine before, I'd ask whoever maintains your building system if something has been changed recently... streaming is a big bandwidth sponge, and adding a couple users in your building may have involked some sharing changes.

[Krispy Kritter]

Are you actually on a LAN inside the apartment building or do you have high speed internet (such as cable) to your apartment? There is a big difference between the two.

[Soopafresh]

Gamers moved into the building.

[sitlet]

no, im not using any p2p programs while trying to stream. but when i do run my p2p program ive noticed a decline in the up and down speeds.

the connection is a lan connection. im not sure if theres a separate connection for each building (about 40 people) or if its one big connection for the whole complex (about 10 buildings). ive emailed the tech department to see if any changes have been made. but like i said, when i run speed tests it shows i have plently of bandwith, and everything else works fine except p2p and streaming videos/audio.

i guess ill wait to see what the tech dept says. im going to take my laptop to my friends house and see if i can get any streaming to work there. ive been on forums for some of the channels that i like to watch, and everybody else says they can watch them fine at teh same time when i cant. so i dont think its a problem with the streaming channels servers.

[sitlet]

well i think ive figured out the problem, but not a solution. i was switching around channels in sopcast to try to find one that worked. i finally found a church channel that i got to work. but its showing my download speed at 115KBs, and my upload to be 0. sopcast works kinda like a p2p program, when you are watching a streaming feed it also uploads the feed back to other users. so because im not uploading, i cant watch the feeds. now i just have to figure out why its not uploading. i uninstalled and reinstalled media player and that didnt help. so maybe the network is blocking somethin...

[RabidDog]

check your firewall settings you might have disallowed your sopcast program from connecting or acting as a server. turn off your firewall if necessary (only for a short test tho)

[Krispy Kritter]

There may not be a fix. If you are indeed on a LAN, then you are at the mercy of how the internet connection is configured by the "tech guys". They could be filtering, limiting, and/or restricting p2p traffic. They could be doing this for several reasons, normally it is to protect the d/l bandwidth. All it would take is 2 or 3 users to be uploading at max speed, and the d/l for all 40 users would suffer.