Videos stop half-way through buffering or slow down. Why is this? What can I do? Options

[Heidymus]

I decided to make one of these posts because some people seem to have a problem with this and do not know what's causing it or what to do so here it goes.

Please keep in mind that most of this applies to videos being extremely slow also:

What's causing videos to stop?

Regarding the videos stopping, if the connection is not stable during the buffering (meaning that your internet service provider drops you even if only for just 2 seconds), it will stop buffering until you load the page again, at which point it will have to start from the beginning. Unfortunately, streaming a video off a website is not like downloading it (where the download resumes once the connection has been established again). In other words, the buffering does not start again from where it left off due to losing connection to that specific server.

What can I do regarding this problem?

Please keep in mind that TV Shack is NOT responsible for this problem. There's really nothing that you can do except buffer videos completely before watching them and make sure that the buffer line has reached its end. This is so that you do not have a problem while watching them. I usually open up different tabs within the same window to load all of the parts so they can be watched smoothly the whole way through.

Depending on the website and the server that it's using, some buffering may be faster than others. Example: Veoh, Megavideo and Google usually buffer quickly. However, Tudou has a bunch of different servers and unfortunately, some are slower than others. Please keep in mind that buffering speed also depends on traffic; in other words, how many people are online not only where it's buffering from but around you so it might be faster during some parts of the day. Right now it's 12:34 pm EST and China is ahead by 12 hours which means that it is past midnight (people are sleeping). So now would be an ideal time to buffer from Tudou servers.

If the buffer line stops completely and you do NOT see something like "transferring from 101.010.01.111 (IP)" on the bottom left of the browser, load the page again.That would definitely be your best bet.

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I thought this might be useful to some.. when watching 56.com hosted videos:

Any suggestions!!! been trying to play episode13 of series 3 of prison break. Buffers fully but when i try to play it it stops after a few minutes and i have to start play from the beginning again. Sometimes it will play the episode for a couple of minutes and sometimes longer. The furthest i've got is about 10 minutes into the episode. I've not had any problems with previous episodes..
Is there anywhere else i can watch it?:confused:

Click the episode part when it does that... it'll rebuffer from where it stopped.

If you notice, it never fully loads. When it does that, it loads to a certain percent then jumps to 100%.

Try the suggestion I gave. If it works, it'll start loading again from where it had stopped.

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When watching Youku-hosted videos:

Just a tip, youku videos are made up of MANY 7minute long video files so opening another tab won't make pre-loading the whole thing before hand possible as when the player loads it only loads each 7min bit after the previous has been played, also some video hosts only allow you to connect to them once, meaning opening 2 windows with one of their videos in would cause one of them to not play properly.