Knowledge Base/Video Features: Frequently Asked Questions/Video Playback

Why Does My Video Skip or Seem Choppy During Playback?

Kevin Dibble
posted this on November 22, 2011 16:36

The quality of video playback is determined by several factors described below:

  1. Quality of the source video file.  Garbage in / garbage out.   The video file that you upload into BombBomb is the best that the quality of the video will ever be.  From upload, BombBomb encodes the video (transcodes) using multiple codecs and a standard bit rate of 1600 kbps.  If your video was recorded at 1080p with more than 1600 kbps, it will be slightly degraded in quality.  If the recording it poor, BombBomb's encoding will not improve it.  Start with a good quality video. 
  2. Speed of the Internet Connection used by the one playing the video.  In general, video plays best using high speed broad band internet connections.   Slow connections (less than 1 Mbit/sec) will cause the player to continually stop and buffer more video, resulting in choppy or intermittent playback.
  3. Latency.   Latency is essentiall delay which is a killer for good quality video playback over a network.  BombBomb stores all encoded videos on a global Content Delivery Network (CDN).  A key purpose of a CDN is to deliver the video from a physical location that is near to the computer playing it, thus reducing latency.   Videos played throug BombBomb should not have a latency problem.
  4. The webcam or video camera used to record the video was limited in performace.  This is quite common.   Videos recorded on slow computers typically start to break up after 2 or 3 minutes, often with video and audio that are out of sync.  Time for a new video camera.  See problem number 1.