micky wrote:
OT Am I waiting for data or not?

I suppose this is a webbrowser question but my setup to ask FFox is
still on the backup HDD.

How is it, when watching a video, one that has two progress bars, one
that shows how much you've watched and another right underneath it that
shows how much you've downloaded, how is that even when you've
downloaded 4 minutes more than you've watched, the playback will still
stop and a spinning circle show up for 10 seconds or more??

I thought that meant it was waiting for more video to download, but the
progress bar shows that several minutes already have. ????

You would need source code to understand what they're doing.

It's possible cache content is being discarded for some reason.

The other possibility, is your playback decoding is so slow, they
have a cache for decoding as well. And if the part running the
display runs out, the decoder has to run for ten seconds to
fill the decoded-cache. If this were the case, the delay with
the busy cursor should be the same precise ten second amount
each time that it happens.

Watch Task Manager and see if you're railed.

The behavior might depend on:

1) Whether the video card decoder can be used.
If Device Manager shows "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter",
then all acceleration is disabled. Not even IDCT. Or a scaler.
Now the CPU has to work like a dog.

2) The power management ("Balanced") might be letting you down.
I've seen cases here, where the CPU absolutely refuses to run
at the "top rate", and you can tell it would help if it did.
Selecting "High Performance" power schema doesn't always work
on its own, and sometimes you have to fiddle with the EIST
and CState settings in the BIOS, to "convince" the Power Management
that it has no choice except to leave the CPU at top speed.

On AMD, the PState while playing a movie would change 30 times
a second. This causes a judder in the video that smooths out
if using High Performance.

3) Some kind of crazy RAM-saving behavior. The OS can ask applications
to return RAM to the system, if RAM is low. A cache might be
considered expendable.

If you have a Smart Phone, play back the same video (over wifi, so your
same data rate applies to the test), and see if the decoding-problem
is gone there. Mobile devices are more highly optimized (the GPU is
more likely to have the right video decoder), whereas
the developers could not give a fig about desktops.

Is this a laptop with a single core CPU running Windows 10 ?
With maybe an HD4200 GPU (out-of-date) ? I have something like
that here, and I wouldn't even dare try for video playback
on that. It would suck.

Paul