Why does the picture on my videos not keep up with the audio

[bluemoonKY]

I frequently download videos from youtube onto Real Player on my laptop. Lately, when I have played videos on Real Player, the picture of the video on my laptop's monitor will freeze for 10 or 15 seconds, but the audio keeps playing normally. Then after 10 or 15 seconds of my picture being frozen, the video will catch up and show the missing 10 or 15 seconds of video really quick, like maybe 2 seconds. What is causing this? When I play videos on Real Player on my laptop, is it shortcomings of my laptop that is causing the video to lag behind the audio, or is the problem with my Real Player itself, not the hardware or other software of my laptop?

 

[Borg]

That's a hard question to answer without knowing a bunch of stuff like the OS version, software versions, RAM, network connectivity status, whether your disk space is nearly full, etc... There could be a number of reasons.

 

[jedishrfu]

This usually means the video frame rate is too high for your computer to handle. They sometimes call this frame dropping. I've seen it happen on ubuntu with VLC for example especially with an HD video.

Do you have other things running or is this a slow computer or is the video HD quality ie lots of data to process?