Is it normal for video to stutter when downloading??

trentlad

trentlad

trentlad

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7 Feb 2010
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I'm not sure if this is normal or whether I have an issue but does your locally stored video stutter when playing while the download bandwidth is completely maxed out?

Example: I'm watching a family video stored on my HDD but initiate the download of a game purchased on Steam to install on a completely seperate internal HDD. As soon as the download bandwidth is maxed out (~3.8MB/s) the video audio starts to stutter and becomes unwatchable.

This isn't the case if my bandwidth isn't fully used, so if I download an HP printer driver and the speed is 2.9MB/s then the video is unaffected.
 
Are you sure it's the downloading that causes the issue, and not the game installing? My computer does this when installing stuff - installing, opening a large rar file etc. The separate hard drive won't make any difference, it's the rest of the system resources that get used during installation.
 
That was just an example, anything I download at the maximum possible speed (3.8MB/s in my case) has the same effect.

Isn't it just a case of the bus being flooded with data?
 
Another perfect example; I'm listening to music on YouTube (in Firefox) and the video is buffered for the next 30 seconds... click on the OcUK 'Animated Image Thread' (in Opera) and it loads at 3.7MB/s but my YouTube audio stutters until the page is fully loaded.
 
I had a similar problem a while back(2 years ago), also found my mouse reaction slowed way down, when downloading torrents. Downloading games(steam, uplay or origin) was'nt an issue.
I could be downloading several torrents at once, but it would be only one causing the problem, so if I paused that torrent, then everything was all right.
Never really understood why that happened, the only thing I did notice was the culprit torrent always seemed to have a high amount of seeds and peers. But did'nt always have the highest down speed.
My spec at the time was 2500K, 8GB and an M4 128GB, broadband was VM 30MB.
Not had this issue in quite a while now.
 
ExRayTed said:
Are you sure it's the downloading that causes the issue, and not the game installing? My computer does this when installing stuff - installing, opening a large rar file etc. The separate hard drive won't make any difference, it's the rest of the system resources that get used during installation.
Click to expand...

If all is working as it should be I don't see how that can be the case. I regularly have videos encoding that peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end and watching other videos at the same time has never been affected, even very large full bluray size ones.

The only time my viewing is affected is when downloading very large files and they're coming in at a fair whack (19MB/s), then the disk IO gets high which causes buffer pauses on video. This shouldn't be the case for the OP only downloading at 3.8MB/s though, especially as it's happening with opening forum pages and even when using separate disks. Sounds to me something is wrong in his system somewhere.
 
sounds like something to do with windows 7 network/media bandwidth throttling

have a look on google or try this

* Open regedit
* Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
* There will be an entry for network performance throttling, default value is 10; set it to FFFFFFFF hex (willl look like 0xFFFFFFFF to the right of the entry)
* Reboot

hope it helps
 
It definitely isn't a network throttle because the audio stutter occurs even on local media.

Might have something to do with my antivirus software apparently but I'm using MSE.
 
Last edited:
Well I disabled 'Real-time Protection' on MSE then tested and everything worked fine so it was definitely that at fault.

The strange thing is, once I re-enabled it the problem completely disappeared. I haven't altered anything else and this had been a consistent issue for over a month. :confused:
 
Am I really the only person who gets this?!?

When I check my CPU it's almost completely maxed out when downloading above 3.70 Mbps.
nq1y81.jpg
 
If your CPU is maxing out when downloading it's probably due to something scanning the files as you're downloading them, such as a real time scanner on Avast, etc. You could check the process that's causing the massive spike..
 
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