Stuttering Downloaded Videos

[RonLuxton]

A new service here in the UK from Dennis Publishing is two "online" magazines - iMOTOR and iGIZMO - full colour, full audio etc and very interesting.

They download perfectly on my Winows XP Pro (SP3) PC which has a Pentium 4, 1024MB RAM, Radeon 9800 PRO video card, but unlike videos from Facebook and similar sites, they "stutter" during play as they keep loading small bits of the video signal.

I've checked the firewall (I keep the Windows firewall "off" and the Trend firewall "on") and I cannot find anything in the security package which seems likely to be affecting the download,

This may be a well known problem and the cure may be simple, but I'm afraid that my knowledge of these things is sadly lacking.

Any help will be gratefully received.

[poisondeathray]

Are they streaming or completely downloaded when you experience the studdering issue? If streaming, it might be a bandwidth issue

What kind of files are they? If you have a completely downloaded file, use mediainfo (view=> text) to determine the characteristics of the file

What media player are you using to view these?

[RonLuxton]

poisondeathray,

Thanks for your interest. These are a couple of the new kind of online magazines which I receive as email, and then click to download the full issue,

Going through the pages there are a number of videos which play when you click on them. It is then that they start to play, so they are streaming, and then they start to stutter. I too suspect that it might be bandwith, but unlike some programs, there are no facilities to select the files size, type of files etc.

My router shows that my broadband downstream is 5836kbps and upstream 448 kps just now.

I don't know what kind of files they are, and the "media player" is the one in the program. I do get a popup saying "Download this file to RealPlayer" but clicking on that SEEMS to download it, but I can find no evidence of it anywhere - and anyway, I want to see it within the program !

Sorry that I'm so thick, but I appreciate your help.

When I click on the email to bring up the website, the address is:

http://dennis.cerosmedia.com/1J48e0b386ada4c960.cde/page/1

Is that enough for you to have a look at it ?

Kind regards

[poisondeathray]

I think it might be a bandwith issue. It might be based in the USA, and you are in the UK so there might be some latency and ping issues

Everything seemed to play ok on my end, but I'm in Canada. They were not that resource intensive, so a P4 (in your profile) should be enough to play them

The videos I saw were Adobe flash player based, so you might want to double check to see if you have all updates

Other than that, maybe someone in the UK can test that site out and hopefully give more suggestions

[RonLuxton]

poisondeathray,

AFAIK these digital magazines come from a UK publisher and are therefore likely to come from a UK source - but who knows where on the WWW anything comes from ?

If YOU can download and use these files without problems in Canada then this suggests a machine/software problem here, doesn't it ?

Apart from moving lock, stock and barrel to Canada (I have relatives there !) I guess I must more probing !

I took your point about Adobe Flash. I had none of this on my PCs so I Googled and downloaded the Adobe Flash Player 9 (which for some unaccountable reason it insisted on unloading as a plug-in to Opera, which I have on my system, but use only occasionally. The emailed magazines open in Internet Explorer) This has improved the quality a lot. It's not perfect - some of the videos still download in small bits and pieces - but the quality is 80% or so better.

Thanks for your input. I'll keep you posted if I discover anything really interesting.

Ron Luxton