Flash video low quality then after 20 seconds nice and sharp

MarcLister · 17 Dec 2012 at 21:26

So I've noticed for a while now that any Flash video I play on the BBC site (News or Sport) are quite low quality then after 20 seconds the videos all sharpen up.

I've checked a BBC Sport video in the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Chrome and IE; all four browsers reproduce the error and all four browsers show the video nice and sharp after exactly 20 seconds.

Has anyone else noticed this? I have the most up-to-date versions of Flash. Could this be a BBC site issue or is there an issue with Flash of late?

ic1male · 17 Dec 2012 at 21:27

This is how it's designed. The video starts off in low qual and then as it factors in your available bandwidth, the video will ramp up until it reaches 1280x720 at 3500kbps.

MarcLister · 17 Dec 2012 at 21:31

Really?

Why does it take 20 seconds to factor in my bandwidth?

ic1male · 17 Dec 2012 at 21:37

It probably takes 20 seconds to switch through the 8 different H.264 profiles. When I was watching the snooker a couple of weeks ago it reached HD in about 10 seconds on my connection.

KIA · 17 Dec 2012 at 22:14

ic1male is correct. The BBC uses adaptive bitrate technology.

Morfik · 17 Dec 2012 at 22:54

Notice the same. Little bit frustrating if it's a short video you miss a lot of it in the low quality mode. Restarting the video doesn't seem to help either it just forgets what quality it was on. On the plus side though when it does reach HD quality it's a lot better than it used to be on the BBC site.

moogle · 18 Dec 2012 at 00:53

MarcLister said:
Really?

Why does it take 20 seconds to factor in my bandwidth?

It could be that the stream speed wasn't over the threshold for it to buffer the HD stream until those 20 seconds. The flash player buffers a little bit of the stream and only switches after that part has finished playing.

Usually switches to a higher stream mode as soon as the little bit of buffered video has finished.