VOD Troubleshooting

Question

I need help figuring out why a swf (simpleplayer) won't
stream a VOD video.
Even when I read the documentation I don't get enough
information to troubleshoot when VOD (Video on Demand) streaming is
not working. Last week, for example, I spent hours trying to find
out why a swf would not work with VOD only to find out through
trial and error that the developer had mis-typed the filename. No
404 error anywhere. Which log should I have looked at? No error
shows up on the console?
So yesterday (and now today too), I'm trying to debug why
another swf won't work. And this time I won't use the swf file
embedded in a html page because the browser cache won't let any
updates be loaded. No I'm going right to the swf file, multiple
time and seeing each connection on the FMS Console. The streams
look like they are started but no bandwidth.
So any idea what is going wrong? Which of the many, many logs
should I look at?
Background. The FMS is at a hosted site. It did work last
week. We rebooted the server to make sure it would come up properly
before we put the server into production. It did, but now the
streams don't work. So had it working once, did not change any of
the config files and now it does not work.
Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Yes. I just got FIOS in the Lansdale, PA area and I can't believe how slow the menu commands are, particularly the OnDemand. The quality of the OnDemand programming is terrible. I have sound drop outs and blurry video. The sound drop outs are usually during the previews and must have something to do with the broadcast quality (changes from Dolby Digital compatible to PCM to 2 channel) ... nevertheless, the sound should be consistent and the quality the highest.
I see someone suggested the following to these issues awhile back ... 
"... is supposed to be addressed in the IMG update to V1.6 - can't verify this as my area is still on V1.5."
How can one tell what update they have?
There are also suggestions about high resource demand being the culprit (e.g. multiple computers running etc.). Certainly this is likely not an issue unless you were trying to run everything at once, right? I have 4 TV's and up to 4 PC's but they are rarely on at the same time.
Besides yelling at Verizon, does anyone have suggestions?
Samsung DLP HLS6188 (HD-DVR motorola box HDMI connected), Samsung 32" HDTV (standard motorola box component connected), Samsung 850 HDTV (HD motorola box HDMI connected), Samsung 450 HDTV (DT700)
2 macbook pro's (wireless)
2 IBM think pads (wireless).