Videos stop after few seconds then continue

Question

My system is W7 Home Premium 32 bit and IE 8
Just recently I find that when I try to play a video clip (generally BBC News
but also others) the rotating circle of dots displays whilst the video is loading
but it then plays (sound and vision) for only a few seconds then stops for about
10 seconds and then resumes playing right through to the end.  If I click on
'play again' it will play the complete video without any interruption.
At first I thought this was my system malfunctioning, but having set up a laptop
for a friend (using W7 Home Premium 63 bit and IE 8) the same thing is happening.
I am posting to this forum as it seems that many video problems are down to
aspects/settings of Flash Player.
All suggestions to resolve this problem greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi, I am glad you were able to get into the BBC site.  You may probably know that the BBC are
forbidden to broadcast commercial advertisements in the UK, but I understand they are allowed
to do so for some of their foreign broadcasts - to recoup some of their expenses.
It occurs to me that because the news video was preceded by an advertisement, the video had
enough time to completely download before it started to play.  Does that sound reasonable?
I get the feeling that my problem is concerned with buffering and the video is starting to play before
it is completely downloaded; as I said previously, replaying the video (when the whole file is presumably
in memory) it plays right through without interruption.
As I stated in my first post, viewing videos on my friend's laptop is also having the same problem.
Instead of connecting the laptop into a network, I have disconnected my own desktop Ethernet
connection from my modem and then connected the laptop via the Ethernet.  That means that the
common things to both systems are the modem and the Internet connection to my ISP, which
makes me wonder if there is a problem with the modem?  It will be interesting to see what happens
when I take the laptop back to him and connect via his router.
Having checked the Shockwave Flash Object I was surprised to find it is version 10.0.045.2
whereas Adobe's 'about' page informs me that I have version 10.1.102.64 of Adobe Flash Player
installed.  I understand that Shockwave is installed as part of Flash Player so do not understand
the discrepancy between versions.  Could the different versions cause a conflict?  However
my friend's laptop shows 10.1.102.64 for Shockwave and Flash Player.
The files in the Flash folder are - Flash101.ocx, Flash Install.log, FlashUtil101_ActiveX.dll
FlashUtil101_ActiveX.exe and install.log
With regards to streaming another site I go to is EarthCam - http://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/
and have no problems watching this.
Hope you may be able to deduce something from all of the above
Thanks
ollyoscar