Two of my favorite shows, I have never seen on TV. That should tell you that I have been able to watch Hulu in the past. My DSL and router are the same, but something has changed.
I’m not sure what I did exactly, but I can’t stand to watch Hulu anymore. In the past, I would pause the show and let the buffer fill significantly and if the show started hiccuping part way through, I would back it up a little and pause again.
Now, for whatever reason (AdBlock add-on?) the programs just stop loading and there is no information being exchanged between the router and the computer.
The problem is not with the line – I called the service provider who also put me on the line with the router manufacture and they agreed everything looked good. Virus scan, adware scan all looks good…
I can load YouTube videos etc.etc. Fact of the matter is that I can often watch the first two thirds of a show before I have a problem; with some programs I never have a problem.
I’m home from work having a nervous breakdown and I would like to watch the Daily Show. I get two minutes or less into the show and it hangs up. Oddly enough, if I log onto the router IP and look at diagnostics, the page starts loading again, but never long enough to be able to watch the show.
Any help you can offer would be appreciated and will keep me from beating my head against the floor.
If it makes a difference, I’m using Vista for OS and Firefox as my browser and I have AT&T DSL through a wireless router.
As fara as I can tell, they haven’t changed recently. (I didn’t do anything explicitly and those that I’ve checked seem appropriate. I was able to get through a show on Saturday night – thought with some frustration – but today I can’t even get through the pre-credit sequence.
…seems to be the same thing. I get 2:50 in and the show halts. I pause and get a ‘buffering’ comment but the router isn’t steadily sending info anymore. If I let it go, I get ip… od… cam… st… type dialogue.
In fact, in the time it took me to click back to this page and type the above, the buffer has only filled one segment.
I appreciate any ideas. I’m feeling pretty stupid about now.
It is possible that you need to upgrade your Flash video player to the latest release, the trick is that you have to look carefully to download the one for Firefox.
You may have to download the latest Flash Player installer from Adobe:
Also: when was the last time you did a full scan for viruses and malware?
I just loaded it when I got the laptop, sometime in January. I’m hoping i don’t have to do that, but I won’t rule it out. No time right now.
Full scan for viruses before I called AT&T (Saturday I think) and a fresh one this morning with a new ADware download and full scan before I started this thread. I even cleared the cookies per the ADware software, but I stopped short of clearing the cache for convenience. I suppose that’s the next logical step. (Multi-tasking making dinner, having nervous break down, picking up son from daycare, having nervous breakdown, walking dog, having nervous breakdown etc. is taxing my limited resources.)
I was hoping I was doing something wrong or that there was something I could fix. I guess I can just watch TV like a caveman!
Are you on a wired or a wireless connection to the router? What happens if you hook your computer via wire directly to the DSL modem?
ETA: Okay, you say the router is wireless–so try a wired connection at the router and then a wired connection directly at the DSL modem to rule out your router not passing wireless traffic properly. They do crap out on wireless more often than a wired connection depending on traffic, we wear out wireless routers fairly quickly around here.
Streaming video is a LOT of packets that have to be passed around in order to get any kind of a decent playback, and any wired connection is going to be less problematical than the best wireless, pretty much. We just had to step up to a gigabit router because the sheer volume of traffic across our home network was getting to the point where the darned router would physically heat up almost enough to cook an egg on! Two of our old wireless routers are still going strong in environments where everything’s wired, but good luck getting those old suckers to pass traffic wirelessly. Right now only my laptop is on a wireless connection, we finally broke down and ran Cat-6 out to the media box and the networked hard drive… The media box is getting MUCH better throughput with the gigabit NIC and Cat-6 than it got on its best day with the wireless NIC.
I’ve also noticed that Hulu does a pretty high resolution video stream as well, which means more traffic to get the show to you. Lower res means less buffering, but it looks crappier.
Oh yeah, almost forgot–if your router is very new and it’s not likely to be borked, do a refresh on the network sniffer of your wireless computer and see if there are any neighbors using WiFi who might be on the same channel as your router, on account of that will step on your bandwidth something fierce. Most people cruise on the default channel for their router, so stepping yours up to channel 11 or summat will usually help avoid conflict with nearby devices. Also, if you have a giant functional electromagnet operating in the middle of your living room, that can kinda disrupt your wireless signal as well…
