How Can I Increase My Buffer

[iGuest 3]

How to increase buffer size on a macHow Can I Increase My Buffer

Right click in the screen of what is being played through Flash.Menu down to settings.Click on the folder icon.Increase the buffer size.

This will make it take longer for the file to begin to play, but it will play with fewer pauses.

-reply by anthara

[iGuest 3]

STUCKING VIDEOSHow Can I Increase My Buffer

HI, iam using 8systems on network.Pc to pc file sharing is excelent.But video files are stuck .Two systems sharing ok. But third pc on problem start (3 pcs stuck video ) ..I use media player,vlc players also please solve my problem.Please

-question by K.P.KUMAR

 

[iGuest 3]

How to make major buffer increase with fixed 25-30Kb/sec satellite connection?How Can I Increase My Buffer

We have a satellite connection that downloads 25-30 Kb/sec (Vista Home) so cannot increase download speed. There must surely be some way we can either download whole segments before playing or cache/buffer enough so it wont play 3 seconds, then download 10 seconds, which is just not usable. (I increased the buffer to 60 seconds, which is the most it would accept and that does not help)

-reply by Steve

[iGuest 3]

Buffers

How Can I Increase My Buffer
There's some misunderstandings about what a buffer is so I'll explain that briefly. Streaming content such as videos can be presented to you, the user, in pieces. Non-streaming content such as a program you're downloading can only be used once the entire file has downloaded. In order to achieve smoothly streamed content, each piece must be downloaded faster than the rate the viewer watches it. For example if a piece video is 1 second long and takes up 100Kb, then you need to be downloading it at a rate of 100Kb or more per second. What happens if you're downloading slower than that rate? The program pauses while it buffers. Buffering is just the process of downloading the pieces of the file and holding it until it can be viewed.

Well as many of you correctly mention, increasing your bandwidth (the speed you download the file by) will have the greatest effect. But that's not always practical. Ideally you'd want to just tell the program to save the whole video (or enough of it so that it doesn't buffer midway through), and then you can go AFK until it's ready. You'd then be able to watch the full video without any interruptions.
Unfortunately there's a couple of limitations. Firstly, video is large and most video utilities have a limit to just how big the buffer will get. However most video utilities allow you to increase the size of the buffer and achieve the effect in the paragraph above (as iGuest's post above demonstrates). Secondly however, the server (the people sending you the video) can impose their own buffer. They do this to make it difficult for copywrite infringing (preventing people from saving the whole video and passing it on to others), and to control their bandwidth (to reduce wasted bandwidth in transmitting pieces of video that the user decides not to even watch).
The latter is a really tough problem to get around and I unfortunately don't have the answer. As an example,

allows 60 seconds of buffering only (once an episode begins, hit pause and watch the buffer fill to maximum at 60 seconds). This is what brings me to this forum - does anyone know a way to bypass the server buffer limits?