Enough Re-Buffering, Hulu!
I’m sure it’s happened to you many times. You’re enjoying a TV show or movie via Hulu.com, the show starts to pick up, an important plot point is about to be revealed when BOOM! everything stops all of sudden and you’re torn out of the moment because, alas, your video has to re-buffer itself to continue.
Perhaps that’s a bit of an over-dramatization, but you understand what I’m getting at. Hulu just does not seem to be able to hold a buffer to save it’s life. And after about the hundredth time of having one of my videos freeze up on me, I finally decided to inquire into why this is always a problem. At first I figured it must just be my computer not being able to work fast enough with streaming media… but I soon realized it wasn’t that at all. It all comes down to Hulu’s buffer quota. You pause your video and your buffer begins to fill to full capacity, and then you play your video — this is the way it’s supposed to be done. But once again, you’re in the middle of your program and suddenly the video glitches and you know all too well what’s coming next — and like clockwork, the video begins to stutter and stop until you’re forced to pause once again for the buffer to refill.
Why can’t it just buffer once and be done with it? Well, as I found out, the answer is right on Hulu’s technical support page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll come across this line:
“The buffer progress bar allows you to see how much of a video has been stored, and when the bars reach ‘full,’ about five minutes of the video have been loaded. (Due to legal reasons, Hulu currently does not buffer more than a small portion of a video at a given time.)”
Exactly what kind of legal reason Hulu is referring to it never really says (or at least I couldn’t find it — perhaps you know?) but it does raise further questions about the online streaming site. The biggest one that comes to mind is whether online streaming sites can ever really replace the TV set when the viewer is forced to pause every five minutes to allow it to re-buffer.
Now, I’ve been a Hulu member since way back when it was still beta testing and I can at least say that streaming is now far more smoother and reliable than it was then, but still the questions remain.
What do you think? Are there more questions to be raised because of these “legal reasons” — are there any solutions?
8 Comments
Draine Weeks
July 9th, 2009
at 3:53pm
I have had no problems with rebuffering on my computer. I have a very good computer with excellent internet connection. My sister has this same problem though. Her problem is that her internet connection is to slow.
You must have a laging conection and or to much runing in the background. I suggest you update your video divers and your flash player. Another problem could be is that your computer just isn’t fast enogh to handle the high quality of HULU.
Now this does happen to me every once in a great while. But this is due to the fact that to many people are trying to watch the same video at the same time. But that is a rarity.
I hope this was helpful to you and helps explain the possible cause to your problem.
Landen Wilson
July 11th, 2009
at 12:42pm
I understand that a lot of lag and/or framerate issues can be due to a poor connection but I use a high-speed cable connection, and rarely have many programs running in the background when viewing Hulu videos — and I also rarely watch the videos in hi-res as well.
I also wasn’t really speaking of the normal skips and stutters usually due to a poor connection, but the ones that happen as a result of Hulu’s buffer running out where it then must be paused to allow a refill. And as I pointed out, this isn’t due to connection speed but Hulu’s own service accessibility.
Anonymous
August 15th, 2009
at 5:43am
Hulu only buffers a small amount of the video at one time because they don’t want people downloading videos to their harddrive. It’s pretty gay.
Richard Peterson
August 26th, 2009
at 9:01am
I have noticed 2 odd things I can’t explain:
Sometimes playback will freeze/play jerkily even though there are 2 or more bars showing in the pause progress bar.
When I pause a Hulu video, my dsl modem shows continous data activity even after the buffer has filled up. I tried this today and let it run 45 minutes after the buffer filled; the modem’s activity light was flickering like crazy the whole time. As soon as I killed the Hulu player the modem stopped blinking. And no, there was no other Internet application running anywhere on our network, but if you try to even bring up Google on another PC the Hulu activity noticeably slows down response. So if the buffer is full, what is it doing all that time?
Specs: 1.5M dsl, new HP laptop, 2GHz, 2GB.
kevin
August 29th, 2009
at 6:24am
i’ve noticed the same thing. i couldn’t find anything on google until i searched for “hulu stops buffering every 2 minutes”. this was the first link.
i’m not entirely sure that their buffer quota is what’s causing this problem, because it doesn’t happen to me on my own computer (i’m typing this on my gf’s computer, which is much higher spec’d than mine). i’m wired, she’s wireless, and maybe that’s the issue somehow? just a thought, but a wireless connection is more lossy than wired, so packets have to be resent more often. so, if you’re on a wireless connection, maybe they have to resend the same data to you more times, thereby depleting their quota faster compared to sending data to someone who is on a wired connection. hope that makes sense.
i’ll test this theory sometime, but, is your connection wired or wireless?
James
November 11th, 2009
at 4:21pm
I am at odds with Hulu. I have an old but premium Dell which I bought extra RAM just for Hulu thinking it would help. It still freezes. I made sure I had no spyware or viruses. I made sure my computer only starts up with the minimum programs. I made sure that no other program is slowing things down and that all of my software is up to date. I connected my CAT5 directly to my cable ISP so it rules out my wireless connection and hulu STILL FREEZES. Not just freezes but my whole computer stops responding. The only temporary fix is restarting my computer. Any ideas?
Guardian
January 6th, 2010
at 11:10pm
I have been battling these problems and more and it takes a lot of research so I feel for all of you. However my PC’s have a Quad and the other has an I7 Procesor, and 4G’s of ram. THEY ARE FAST ! . One problem is the compatability of Adobe Flash Player ( They have a new update ) .
But the one thing that stoped the pausing and freezing was ” Setting Continuous Play ” to OFF.
Try it it could be that simple as HULU NEEDS TO FIX THEIR SITE ! ! ! ! !
Vertigo
January 19th, 2010
at 8:01pm
My guess as to the legal reasons is that if it buffers the whole video, the entire thing is in cache and can be saved to a file, essentially allowing the copyrighted material to be easily downloaded. For example, this is easily done with YouTube and many other similar videos. I would guess that if you’re connection isn’t able to stream the video at least close to real-time, you probably wouldn’t want to bother with Hulu. Then again, maybe if it’s a little slow and you could buffer, say, 15 minutes, it could keep up enough to stay ahead of your viewing for the length of a 45 minute show, so I don’t see why they don’t extend the buffer limit.
It’s possible, though not very likely, that it has something to do with Hulu trying to save some bandwidth too. If somebody starts a video and doesn’t finish it, better Hulu only expends the bandwidth to buffer 5 minutes instead of 10 or 15.
Interestingly, and what I’d like to find an explanation for, the buffer seems to be just as much cpu dependent as bandwidth dependent. That is, even with my (just tested) 8 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up connection, the buffer drains, extremely quickly, and just can’t keep up, when I’m running tasks that consume the entire cpu (Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz). I could understand if when doing this the video would just skip or pause or whatever, but it plays pretty smoothly, for a couple minutes, and then it stops, as the buffer is empty. However, when the cpu is free, the buffer maintains itself at full capacity just fine. I find it very odd that it would need cpu to do the actual buffering.