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

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around the phenomenon of video playback becoming jerky after pausing and resuming, particularly in the context of online streaming. Participants explore potential causes related to buffering, caching, and streaming policies across various platforms.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant notes that pausing a video until it is fully buffered often leads to jerky playback upon resuming, questioning the underlying reasons for this effect.
  • Another participant mentions that certain sites, like YouTube, have experienced slow buffering, suggesting that streaming policies may have changed.
  • A participant proposes that the jerky playback could be due to running out of cache on the hard drive during a long pause, leading to increased random access overhead.
  • There is a suggestion that if the entire video is downloaded before playback, the jerky effect should not occur.
  • One participant expresses uncertainty about their observation regarding YouTube's streaming policies, indicating that they may not be correct.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express multiple competing views regarding the causes of the jerky playback issue, with no consensus reached on a single explanation.

Contextual Notes

Some participants reference specific sites and their streaming behaviors, indicating that experiences may vary based on the platform used. There are also mentions of technical factors related to hard drive performance and caching that remain unresolved.

Who May Find This Useful

This discussion may be of interest to individuals experiencing similar issues with video playback, particularly those using various online streaming platforms and those curious about the technical aspects of video buffering and playback performance.

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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.
 
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What sites? I've found that youtube lately can be very slow and the buffering poor.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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).
 
Borek said:
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!
 
Greg Bernhardt said:
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.
 

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