Easy question, me thinks. When on the internet, viewing videos, what does a computer need so that the video doesn't frequently freeze in relation to the audio?
Easy question, me thinks. When on the internet, viewing videos, what does a computer need so that the video doesn't frequently freeze in relation to the audio?
A faster network connection.
Possibly a better (faster, more memory) video processor (which usually means an aftermarket video card in older PCs) But 9/10 times the issue lies with the speed of the cable/DSL/etc connection. Unfortunately that's also the hardest thing to fix.
In reply to ultraclyde:
What kind of connection is considered good enough?
It bears mentioning that some videos are hosted on a web server that is relatively slow, or due to high demand, have accepted too many connections to dish up the video in a timely fashion.
Memory is the first thing to look at: Windows likes memory and lots of it.
http://www.speedtest.net/ will test your connection. I really don't know the range of "acceptable", but my connection seems to work pretty well for most youtubey stuff, and my results were:
ping: 16ms
download: 23.2 Mpbs
upload: 3.59 Mbps
EDIT: As noted by others above, this is not the only question.
My speedtest results:
ping 12ms download 30.79 upload 6.14
I'm on Comcast cable, and other than being pricey, the service is great.
DoctorBlade wrote: Memory is the first thing to look at: Windows likes memory and lots of it.
Windows?! Does anybody even use that anymore? 
stuttering network based video could be so many things, that its difficult to diagnose in one go on a message board.
If you can play video back without stuttering from a regular file on your hard drive, then you have enough RAM.
If the audio continues playing, you're likely choking on processing power. If the network wasn't fast enough, the audio would likely die off too.
what are you using to play the videos?
A lot of time when I am watching videos I will go to the link and pause the video to let the buffering cache more of the video before I begin playback. That helps a lot with the stalling/stuttering problem for me.
EastCoastMojo wrote: A lot of time when I am watching videos I will go to the link and pause the video to let the buffering cache more of the video before I begin playback. That helps a lot with the stalling/stuttering problem for me.
That helps for me sometimes as well.
Sometimes simple things help too; a nice reboot every day helps keep your system happy. Putting it to sleep at night isn't the same thing. Make sure you aren't running other background applications that are sucking your internet bandwidth. (Also, if your computer is set up for multiple profiles, another user may have something running in the background.)
Still, my first suspicion would be the internet connection.
My home connection runs 10-12 Mbps to the in-country servers on the speed test at whatismyip.com and I can stream video with no problems. My work connection was in the 6 Mbs range and the videos were virtually useless As mentioned, there are literally thousands of points in the transfer path that could slow it down as the data moves from the hosting server to your computer. Other than checking your home connection speed and upgrading if necessary, there's not much you can do about that side of the equation. Most bigtime viseo sites - youtube, vimeo, netflix, etc. - will do a lot of work to make sure the pipeline th their servers is way faster than the average home connection.
Check the speed of your connection first. If it's above 10Mbps on the download side (the one that matters) then try to see if there are a lot of background processes running that are using up memory and cpu resources. You can check that on one of the other tabs of the Task Manager in windows and see how much of the resources are being used while running the video. If you aren't maxing the resources out, look into getting a video card that will work with your particular PC. There are several different card connection standards in the recent history of desktop PCs. Good basic cards can be had for $50 or less.
I hope that helps some, those problems can be hard to solve because there are SO many variables.
I'm pinging 8ms, 120mb down and 30mb up, im on comcast as well.
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