Monday, August 06, 2012

BBC Olympic streaming video quality

I tried watching BBC's live video on my Dell laptop with 4 GB of RAM an Intel Core 2 CPU with a 3.06 Ghz clock speed and an Nvidia Quadro FX 770M display chip using a proxy server.

I ran two tests. For the first, the laptop was running several other applications and used over 3 GB of memory as shown here.

The BBC does not display the transmission rate, but, as you see, the image quality when viewed full screen is satisfactory; however, there were occaisonal pauses for buffering and the video was a little jerky.

I then stopped all applications but the Web browswer and tunneling application, cutting the memory footprint and CPU utilization.

The video quality remained good and the jerkiness stopped, but the video still paused for buffering at times. The BBC does not display the resolution or data rate, but it looks like 360p to me. Whatever the true speed or resolution is, it was good enough to relax and watch full screen.

Note that I accessed the BBC stream through an English proxy server, which may have affected performance. (I used it only to write this review).

2 comments:

  1. If you right click on a BBC video it does display bitrate, and video size. You can also right click and choose "Toggle Info Console" and it will display bitrate, your connections speed and which bitrate you're currently receiving.

    Video quality changes depending on how much bandwidth you have available.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Scott -- I don't think about right clicking on Web pages. Will check it out.

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