Fix Constant Buffering, Choppy, or Skipping Audio and Video
This guide will attempt to help you solve common but sometimes hard to diagnose problems you may have when listening to audio and video online on sites such as Last.fm and YouTube.
Symptoms
- Choppy audio/video
- Constant buffering
- Audio/video does not load
Possible causes
Whenever you are downloading or uploading something, you are using bandwidth. Even loading this website used a small portion of your available bandwidth. You are allocated a certain amount of bandwidth that you can use at one time. How much you are able to use at one time depends on what service plan you have with your ISP.
If you are trying to watch a video on YouTube, but you are also downloading something that is using all of your bandwidth, there will not be any left to download the YouTube video. The video will pause and the download progress bar will slowly increase, but not enough so that you are able to continue watching the video for more than a few seconds.
Possible solutions
Note: The suggestions below apply to all of the computers in your house
If the problem is being caused by a lack of available bandwidth, then the easiest way to solve it is to pause or stop any file transfers. For example, if you are currently downloading any files, you might want to try again when they have finished downloading. The web browser Mozilla Firefox supports the pausing of downloads, although some websites do not support this.
Peer-to-peer applications such as LimeWire and BitTorrent are designed to quickly download and upload files. When their settings are configured incorrectly, they may try use as much bandwidth as possible. In some cases, you may not even be able to browse the Internet. Try closing these kinds of programs and see if it solves the problem.
Instant messaging programs such as Yahoo, MSN, and AIM use an insignificant amount of bandwidth when you are chatting, so you do not have to worry about them. However, make sure you are not video chatting.
Keep in mind that the website that the video or audio is on may be having problems. There is nothing you can do to solve this unless you can find the content on another website. If this is the case you will have to wait until the problems are resolved before trying again.