Have you ever heard or seen the term "buffering" when trying to play a video or audio file over the internet? Even if you haven't heard the term before, you've certainly seen it in action. In very non-technical terms, I will describe what is happening...

Video files are usually rather large, and so when you go to play a video on a website such as YouTube, it won't be able to play it back immediately because of the size. Your computer is essentially downloading a temporary version of that video file so that it can play it for you. Video buffering is the technical term for this downloading action.

So, if you open a webpage and try to play a video immediately after the page has loaded, the video likely won't play right away, or will likely stop somewhere along the way. If you ever have experienced choppy playback, where the video stops and starts frequently, this is because your computer must download bits of the file before it can play any more. So, it downloads a little, plays a little, downloads a little, plays a little, until the entire video is downloaded.

How can you tell when the video is completely buffered? It's actually very easy, as most video players have a simple method of displaying it for you.  This is an example of the video control bar at the bottom of a YouTube video:

As you will see, there are two red lines. The darker read line shows the progress of the movie (how far you've watched), the light red line to the right of it shows how much of the movie has buffered. Once the light red buffering line is all the way to the right of the bar, the video is completely buffered and you should have no issues playing the video smoothly. If, however, you can't see the light red line and your video has stopped, it's a good idea to wait until the whole video is completely, or mostly, buffered before you start watching it again.

So how to you stop buffering? You can't stop it. The best thing to do is to wait for the entire movie, or at least half of it, to buffer before you start. Then, the remainder of the movie can continue buffering while you start watching the beginning. Buffering will take longer if you have a slow internet connection, or if you have several programs (web browsers, e-mail programs, chat programs) connecting to the internet while you're trying to watch your video. If it is a long video, you may consider closing some of these other programs until the video is completely buffered.

For more information, check out this page in YouTube's help files.

Tags: video | youtube