Troubleshooting Real-Player

Why am I waiting?

In order to help things run as smoothly as possible, Real Player uses a 'buffer system'. This means that the player buffers a certain amount of the clip in memory before beginning to play. This guarantees a certain amount of smooth playback, even if the stream slows down due to heavy network traffic. You can set the buffer size yourself and depending on how you have your Real Player set up will affect how much of the clip will be buffered before playback begins.

Why is the playback not smooth?

Sometimes, when traffic is high or you have a slow processor or only a small amount of RAM, playback will become jerky. This can either be manifested as the audio continuing to play but the video freezing up, or vice versa.

There are a number of ways of dealing with this problem depending on the cause (traffic, processor, RAM etc.). If you have a reasonable buffer size (the default is to buffer as much as memory will allow) simply press the pause button on the Real Player when you notice the jerking begin. This will give the buffer a chance to fill back up. After a while (5 to 10 seconds is often enough) press the play/pause button again and playback should resume, smoothly.

Another thing to try is to set your buffer size to zero. This will allow slightly faster playback as processor speed is not affected by any buffering operations. To change your buffer size, go to the “View” menu. Click on “Preferences” then “General” then “Buffered Play” and change the setting to “Buffer at least 0 seconds.”

Where is the Motion?

Streaming media has one major drawback. Even if you have a state of the art computer and even if the clip has been encoded for a very fast connection, you are limited by the speed that the signals travel to your computer. It is possible to encode really good quality clips - up to 15 frames per second. However the phone lines simply do not support this kind of speed.