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Setup Issues and Embedding

Video pauses a lot on initial viewing

5 replies [Last post]
Posted: Wed, 2009-01-21 11:52 localdog
Anonymous's picture

I am generating mp4 video files, all under 15mb in size, and playing them on my site using JW player 4.3.132

During the first viewing, the video pauses - a LOT - while the video downloads. Im on high-speed cable also.

Once it's fully downloaded and cached it plays smooth on subsequent viewings. I don't notice this constant pausing when im viewing mp4 files on other sites, like bits on the run for example. If I upload the same video to Facebook or youtube and embed them on my site, they play fine with no pausing on the first 'viewing'.

Why does it happen on my site, and what can I do to prevent that from happening?

Posted: Wed, 2009-01-21 11:57 lefTy  
lefTy's picture

On the player's scrubber bar, is the colored portion, that indicates how much of the video has downloaded, staying ahead of the scrubber bar?

If you have a fast connection, then the frequent pausing to download more of the video file would indicate a possible problem with your hosting service limiting the bandwidth.

Posted: Thu, 2009-01-22 03:11 JeroenW  
JeroenW's picture

One thing we found out is that the actual downloading of the video takes a lot of resources (CPU). Once the video has fully downloaded this stress immediately drops. We did some tests with trying to lower this through actionscripting, but it seems like the internal video download management in the Flash Player is responsible for this.

I can recommend you to try setting up a subdomain that serves the videos throttled (not on full speed). Most webservers have this functionality set in config files. Perhaps that will reduce the stress.

Posted: Thu, 2009-01-22 08:29 lefTy  
lefTy's picture

@Jeroen,

I've seen the same thing. For a 1280x720 MP4, during the download phase, the CPU goes to near 100%, even on very fast machines. Once the downloading is done, the CPU will drop to 25% or less.

Normal downloading only takes 1% or less of the CPU, so Flash must be incredibly inefficient. It doesn't even have to decompress or anything like that; just pass the data to the hard disk.

Posted: Thu, 2009-01-22 22:36 localdog  
localdog's picture

@ lefTy

The progress bar does stay significantly ahead of the scrubber bar, but it still pauses frequently. When a little more than 3/4 of the video has downloaded then it will play without pausing.

What really threw me off was when I tested this on a friends comp today. Mine is a P4 2.4ghz 1gb ram, but hers is a really old 733mhz w/256 mb ram and the video paused less during initial playback on hers than it did on mine. (???)

Posted: Sun, 2009-02-01 14:24 Petri  
Petri's picture

I do not know if this is a solution or not, but please also check that your web server is serving the correct content type in response headers. I had tremendous trouble in progressive downloading -- the first download often had some kind of memory leak and crashed the whole browser (Firefox) with a 150 MB file (even though some youtube high quality files are 300 MB and more and play fine), and when it did not crash, only the first few minutes was downloaded and then the progress bar mysteriously jumped to full without ever downloading it fully. Then I noticed with wget -S that apache served Content-Type: text/plain. I added AddType video/mp4 .m4v to .htaccess and now everything plays beatifully! (I have muxed them with mp4box without extra parameters such as hinting or isma).

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