Prior to reducing video stutter we need to find out why its happening in the first place.

Which will enable us to hopefully resolve the problem or at least highlight what is causing it and find a fix or work around.

Video Stutter – Freezing Video – Jerky Video whatever you call it, it can happen due to 3 reasons

Causes and Resolutions

• Streaming or Online Video – Internet Connection is too slow for the media.

  An easy way to check the speed of your internet connection, which should be your first test is to use a site such as speedtest.net this will give you a pretty accurate idea of the download and upload speed of your internet connection, just because your Internet service provider gives you an 8mb connection does not mean you will have 8mb, most contracts stipulate up to 8mb, so in effect you could have between 50k and 8mb – for more in speeding up your internet connection check our other articles on this.

• As a rule of thumb if your internet connection is about 2mb or above it should be fine for most video content.
• Closing any other applications accessing the internet is a good way of reducing video stutter – this also goes for shared internet connections, if other computers are using the same connection, depending on what they are doing, it is very easy to eat up all the internet bandwidth, leaving videos slow and glitchy.
• High resolution videos need high speed internet connections it’s a simple as that, playing high resolution videos directly from the web on even a medium connection can be painful.
• The server streaming the video is too slow.

  Depending on the hardware performance of the server where the video is stored, its internet connection and the amount of connections to the server; this all plays a big role in the speed of the video being streamed, during busy times, traffic can increase 100 fold causing all kind of video speed issues.

  Of course unless you have any control over the server there is no direct way of reducing video stutter, the only options are to download the file locally before playing it, or grin and bare it, or view the video at a quieter time.

• The computer playing the video is simply not powerful enough.

  Having a computer that is not powerful enough to run videos is all too common these days with many videos and movies in full HD format 1080p, it does not matter if you download the video or watch it online, if your computer is not powerful enough it wont make any difference, causing freezing video to the point of it being unwatchable.

  Of course there are many ways to resolve this, the easiest is to simply purchase another video card, very easy to do if you are using a desktop computer, a decent PCIe card such as an ATI 4350 can be bought for around £30 which will allow just about all video content to be played.

  But what if you are using a laptop? Upgrading the video card is usually not an option in this case, the only thing we can change are software settings.

For more on the improving laptop graphics find out what options are available

Many laptop have what are called shared memory type video cards, this means the video memory is shared between the computer main memory or RAM, so if you have a computer with 2gb of RAM, you can allocate around 256mb to the video leaving around 1.7gb left for the main RAM.

So to begin with allocate as much memory as possible to the video.

This can be accomplished by going into your computers BIOS.

Apart from this experiment using various video players, it is a fact that some video players out perform others, one that works really well is the Windows classic video player, search the web for code lite pack, this should have the video player built in.

computer adviser reducing video stutter article