Laptop Video Streaming Help

[pllcull08]

I recently bought a brand new HP laptop and I'm experiencing lag when I stream content online.

Specifically, YouTube videos in HD, or Amazon Instant Video in HD. I've heard plenty of complaints about Amazon Instant Video's streaming software/system and from what I can gather it's likely Amazon's fault and not something I can fix (I've seen many threads pertaining to its use of Silverlight). But usually I am able to simply turn of the HD option and I can stream it fine in SD. But tonight it has been jittery even in SD! The sound seems almost crackly and the video is lagging also. Oh, and I complained to Amazon about this, and they tried to lazily blame it on my download speeds and said my internet wasn't good enough. I get 50mpb/s download speed and 18mbp/s upload speed. So needless to say, that isn't the issue...Needless to say, I'll be switching to Netflix as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Whenever I play YouTube videos in 1080p, they lag. In fact, right now I'm trying to stream a video in 720p and it's lagging. The audio and video don't match up, the audio skips, as does the video. It's not a nice experience. And from what I can gather the laptop which I have should be very capable of streaming HD video content. My old laptop was basically a brick yet it did not have these issues.

Although I will say that something I have noticed is that if my laptop is plugged in (i.e. charging) it seems to perform better than when it is working on battery alone. Additionally, when my laptop is plugged in and I switch browser from Chrome to IE, I am able to stream 1080p without lag. How is this? IE is a much slower browser from my experience and Chrome has never failed me before. What has changed?

I'm currently installing all recommended updates from HP to see if that helps. If it does I'll update this thread.

If you need some more information, which I would assume you will, please let me know and I will be happy to provide whatever information I can to resolve this issue.

Thanks in advance!

 

[turkey3_scratch]

I think I know the problem and your plugging it in told me. Go into the control panel and go into power options, and select "high performance". I am guessing your laptop is lowering the CPU frequency to save power and that is resulting in slower decoding of HD video. ou can also go into "Change plan settings" > "Change advanced power settings" and see other things and set their performance higher. One of those options is processing performance which you should make sure is on high.

Make sure you have the high performance plan set for both running on battery and on power. If you still experience lag, open task manager with ctrl-alt-del and see what CPU usage says for your web browser.

It could also be because Chrome uses the Pepper Flash plugin for viewing Youtube videos but IE if you don't have Flash uses the HTML5 viewer.

 

[pllcull08]

Thank you! I had been in these settings before and thought I had put everything to maximise performance but it seems that I missed a couple of categories! Many thanks.

 

[geekyboi]

I think I know the problem and your plugging it in told me. Go into the control panel and go into power options, and select "high performance". I am guessing your laptop is lowering the CPU frequency to save power and that is resulting in slower decoding of HD video. ou can also go into "Change plan settings" > "Change advanced power settings" and see other things and set their performance higher. One of those options is processing performance which you should make sure is on high.

Make sure you have the high performance plan set for both running on battery and on power. If you still experience lag, open task manager with ctrl-alt-del and see what CPU usage says for your web browser.

It could also be because Chrome uses the Pepper Flash plugin for viewing Youtube videos but IE if you don't have Flash uses the HTML5 viewer.

Your solution helped me! Thank you!