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I’m currently watching the live stream for the NHL playoffs from CBC Sports. The quality isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing.

I had some difficulty getting a reliable stream in Windows Media Player. It worked fine on my MacBook using Flip4Mac, and it worked okay using VLC on my Windows machine. Yet, Microsoft’s media player was showing me five seconds of live video, and then freezing (the dreaded ‘buffering’) for 5 to 30 seconds. Five more seconds of live footage, and repeat.

I checked my connection speed, which was a robust 14 MB/second. Combine that with the reliable feeds on other apps and PCs, and the problem was certainly (and predictably) Windows Media Player.

I eventually solved the problem. Here’s how:

1. Start up Windows Media Player.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
3. On the Performance tab, under Network buffering (yes, I’m troubled by the lack of title case), choose the second option. In the box beside Buffer, enter ‘30′. See the screenshot below. This ensures that Windows Media Player will always queue up 30 seconds of video, ensuring that you don’t get jittery or frozen video.
4. Click OK, and you should be good to go.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Technology. Tag Testing Project: cbc, live feed, nhl, sports, streaming, windows media player, wmv. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.