Why does pausing a video cause it to become jerky when resumed?

[3.141592]

Hello all,

Often when I try to watch a video online it will stop every few seconds to buffer (whatever that means) the next few seconds of the video. This is annoying, so I tend to pause the video until the little time bar at the bottom shows it's all, or nearly all, buffered.

But often I find that, if I wait a long time, when I continue playing the video, the picture is all jerky and stilted whereas before, when I first played it, it was smooth.

Can anyone tell me why this is and if there is a way to avoid it please?

Sometimes it seems like, if I can pause it right after it starts, even before any image appears on screen, this jerking effect after waiting for it to buffer doesn't happen. But this might just be coincidence.

Thankyou.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

What sites? I've found that youtube lately can be very slow and the buffering poor.

 

[Borek]

I believe youtube changed their streaming politics some time ago - they stream the data only as long as you are watching the video, so it is no longer possible to buffer it all and watch later.

 

[3.141592]

Hi Borek, Greg,

Thanks for replying. Youtube has not given me much trouble of late. It's a variety of sites. I am thinking of when watching tv shows off of fastpasstv, which collects links. So mostly putlocker or nomamov or gorillavid.

I don't watch them as they are being shown on tv, if that's relevant.

 

[rcgldr]

It could be due to the fact that with a long pause, you've run out of cache for the hard drive, and the reading and writing locations on the hard drive are far enough apart that it's causing a lot of random access overhead. There's also the issue of all the directory and the list of allocated clusters being updated during writes. However if you wait for the entire video to download, this shouldn't be a problem.

If indexing is enabled for your hard drive, you might want to turn that off (this can be done in Windows XP, not sure about later versions of Windows).

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I believe youtube changed their streaming politics some time ago - they stream the data only as long as you are watching the video, so it is no longer possible to buffer it all and watch later.

ahhhhhh very interesting. Thanks for that bit of info Borek!

 

[Borek]

ahhhhhh very interesting. Thanks for that bit of info Borek!

That's just an observation I made some time ago, can be I am wrong.