I doubt anyone’s going to have a solution for this, but I figured I’d ask.
Almost every time I watch a video from Penny Arcade TV, on my laptop, at around the 4:30-5:00 minute mark, my wifi network connection will drop, and I won’t be able to see my home network anymore. The only way to fix it seems to be a reboot. (I’ve tried waiting, I’ve tried disabling the network adaptor, then re-enabling, etc.)
Videos from other sites work fine. It’s just this one site, and always at about the same point in the video. the full video loads, so I can watch one at a time, if I’m willing to reboot in between them.
It’s not a big deal, since I can watch on my desktop ok, but it’s annoying and weird. Any thoughts?
(No, this is not a subtle viral marketing ad for PATV… I’m just a fan.)
My first thought is that something specific in their videos isn’t being handled correctly by your network adapter and the driver is crashing. Try updating the wifi driver (if there’s a later driver available).
My second thought, knowing nothing about that particular web site, is that their video is kicking off some sort of script which is either malicious or severely malfunctioning. What browser are you using and do you have some sort of script disabler installed?
Go to the web site of your router’s manufacturer.
Check to make sure you have the latest version of the router firmware.
It’s usually under “support” or “downloads.”
Is PATV streaming from a single server, or is it using some kind of peer-to-peer BitTorrent-esque arrangement? The latter could be killing your wifi by opening too many simultaneous connections.
when you get your laptop kicked off the wifi, does anything happen to your desktop’s connection
is it any video on penny arcade, or just 1 video
can you try to attach the laptop to the router with a wire instead of wifi and see if it still happens
If the problem only happens with wifi, then I would first suspect the router. Could be that when you are watching those vids over wifi it’s giving the router more than it can handle computationally and it causes it to glitch out.
I’ve updated my router driver recently, and I also recently went looking for a newer driver for my network card, but to no avail. The website is a relatively well respected webcomic and video game community site. I doubt malicious scripting very much.
But some script that doesn’t like my browser (chrome) is possible I suppose. I’ll try in a different browser and see what happens. (though it works in chrome on my win7 desktop. The laptop is XP).
No idea what’s going on behind the scenes. I’m not using any sort of torrent software to view it. To me, it appears to be just a video embedded in a webpage, like youtube. (I guess they are using flash or something?)
wifi as well. I realize there are a lot of variables at play, but on that the two PCs are the same.
no, I don’t think they exhibit any sort of connection like that. (It’s not that the wifi router goes down. The laptop just stops seeing it.) I’ll double check next time.
Any video on the site. Or at least, the several dozen episodes of the same series I’ve watched. It doesn’t happen 100% of the time. Maybe 9/10, but it doesn’t seem linked to the individual video. The same video that had the problem might not have it next time I play it.
As ftg implies, it’s possible for Flash to use peer-to-peer on its own, without relying on BitTorrent software. I don’t know why anybody would do that for video streaming, though, it seems like a really bad idea…