Watching video on the Web

By the Ourmedia staff

If you're having problems watching video on the Web, a number of causes might be the culprit.

If you're able to see video but it stalls, it's likely a bandwidth issue. If your video stalls, sometimes it will resume on its own after a few seconds. If it doesn't, try reloading the page. Videos also load faster or slower depending on your modem's connection speed and on how many others are sharing your network.

Video is notoriously bandwidth-hungry, so videos often chug along sluggishly when they stream to your desktop. If you're watching a streaming video, you may be able to wait until it's loaded into your cache and then play it. Some videos, such as QuickTime movies, start playing a few seconds after they start downloading to your hard drive, a process called progressive download. Once fully downloaded, such videos can be played any number of times with no time lag.

If you have the right media player but your video or audio file repeatedly stalls when you try to play it, one alternative is to save it directly to your hard drive. Here's how to save videos to your computer. Some people prefer to subscribe to video feeds and watch the video with a software player such as Miro (the former Democracy Player), FireAnt or another RSS reader.

If you can't see the video at all, you likely don't have the proper media player to view it. Some sites like YouTube or Yahoo! Video convert uploaded videos into Flash, which comes pre-installed on the vast majority of personal computers. Other sites like Ourmedia display the video in the format the producer created it in, such as QuickTime, Windows Media Video, Real or DivX.

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