[jasberto]

has any one else had this problem, i cant stream movies for a long period of time without it pausing/ buffer/ hangs
it happens on any kind of video content
even well known sites like megavideo
it will work for like ten minutes then will just stop can anyone help, i only bought this to watch stuff

[kbz1960]

Are you using wifi or bridge?

[jasberto]

over wifi and my bandwidth is good.

[kbz1960]

Do other devices work fine? Has it always been that way? Have you rebooted the playbook and restarted your router?

[jasberto]

yes i can stream fine on all my devices ps3, laptop etc....
i have restarted my playbook, this problem has been happening since i had the playbook for about 4 months. can you stream for lang periods with out any hiccups? i always have to fast forwarded to get it to start playing again

[kbz1960]

I don't stream much but did hook up to my 50" hdtv to watch a football game once and watched the whole game.

Maybe try a hard reset hold power + and - all at the same time until it reboots.

[jasberto]

is that different from powering off and then powering on

[kbz1960]

is that different from powering off and then powering on

Yes, kind of like a battery pull on a bb.

[elchavodellethbridge]

I was having the same problem watching Univision. I thought it was just Justin.tv freezing up, but after a reboot it all cleared up.

[Blkacesvf41]

has any one else had this problem, i cant stream movies for a long period of time without it pausing/ buffer/ hangs
it happens on any kind of video content
even well known sites like megavideo
it will work for like ten minutes then will just stop can anyone help, i only bought this to watch stuff

Do you have the latest OS build? Mine works perfect. It takes a little longer to connect sometimes when am tethering, but over WIFI it works great.

[kill_9]

I regularly stream television shows over WiFi on the BlackBerry PlayBook without issue about 99% of the time. From time to time the streaming stops and buffers but never recovers to the point of continuing; this is a rarity though. I cannot say with certainty whether this issue is tablet, ISP, or television network related.

[Blkacesvf41]

I regularly stream television shows over WiFi on the BlackBerry PlayBook without issue about 99% of the time. From time to time the streaming stops and buffers but never recovers to the point of continuing; this is a rarity though. I cannot say with certainty whether this issue is tablet, ISP, or television network related.

About the only issue I had is at crackle.com. Sometimes when it goes into the commercial break, it hangs up in the dark screen for a few seconds.

[majorusa]

I had this issue. Solved it by changing the setting of the router from auto to N only. It worked like a charm.

[kill_9]

About the only issue I had is at crackle.com. Sometimes when it goes into the commercial break, it hangs up in the dark screen for a few seconds.

This has been my experience with streaming media from television networks. The buffering or black screen appears primarily during transition to commercial break. That said, 99% of the time streaming is flawless. Overall, this tablet is at least as good as my notebook in terms of streaming.

[bpdude]

One thing you can try is unplug modem and router from the wall wait a minute or 2 and try again. This usually works for me. It may be network congestion.

[kbz1960]

Sometimes deleting the wifi profile for your router from the playbook and then redoing it helps too. Might also help to know what your router settings are.

[rdonko]

This is exactly what I am experiencing also. The 16 GB of space has finally proven not to be enough and needed a different method to stream all my kids videos (recorded from TV or converted from DVD).

I run WHS 2011 for various reasons but utilize the webserver a lot. I decided to install Gallery Server Pro which allows me to link to my NAS and display a secure webpage library with all kid appropriate content. In the past I have always just placed the video files directly on the playbook. But you run out quick and changing the content is not high on my priority list.

Pre November'ish there were no issues because all videos were played locally, now that they are hosted as the OP stated the video freezes, hangs and then ulitimately crashes and you have to restart. I usually get anywhere from 2 to 5 mintues of video play.

So here is what I did to attempt to rememdy the issue....

I have two wireless connections running, tried them both, same issue
I tried various video formats, same issue
I tried a different browser and downloaded dophin, same issue
Gallery server pro allows you to stream OR download the video locally, I downloaded, NO issue with video

I then tried my wifes ipad, no issues at all
tried my laptop, no issues
tried two desktops, no issues


All arrows point to browswer issues. I have tried AVI, flv, mp4, mpg...mp4 being the final version as it works on all systems we have.

Any ideas here?

[chrisgotabb]

I am also having the same issue as reported by others here.

[Tha.Housewife]

yes i can stream fine on all my devices ps3, laptop etc....
i have restarted my playbook, this problem has been happening since i had the playbook for about 4 months. can you stream for lang periods with out any hiccups? i always have to fast forwarded to get it to start playing again

same here but with streaming music ( I dunno about movies yet tho but when streaming my nobex radio it cuts out and I have to reboot to get audio again)

[chrisgotabb]

@OP, you might need to improve your internet connection speed to stream videos from the net with your PB or choose a lower quality video setting. Also try reducing the number of devices using your WiFi connection. I have found the PB doesnt error out as long as there is plenty of steady bandwidth.

Ok I have found a solution that is working for me with my PC media server

So here's what I think is happening: I never have issues streaming over youtube or other websites, but when I stream videos from my server on my PC, there is no Flash or HTML5 being used as an intermediary to stream the video. Flash/HTML 5 will significantly buffer the video so that you will not have any issues when momentary data transfer interruptions occur, however if you attempt to stream a direct video file (.avi, mp4) instead of through a flash/html5 webpage, the PlayBook will not buffer the video nearly as much. Consequently if there is any momentary interruption in data flow, the PB will error out.

Solution!
Since the PB isn't buffering as much when directly accessing video files (assuming I am correct), you need to improve the flow of your data transfer over your network, or decrease the size of the data being streamed per second:

First, (and you may not have to do this step) I upgraded my server PC from XP to Windows 8 (W8 is only $40 right now). After doing this the errors dropped from consistently every 7 minutes to every 16 minutes when streaming SD TV shows. (~180MB per 21mins).

Secondly to eliminate the issue, I needed to decrease the size of my videos, (although sadly you will see a small loss in video quality). I am currently decreasing the video file size in half to start with. There is a free application you can use to do this called ffmpeg. This is accomplished by decreasing the bitrate and reducing the frame rate.

After downloading a binary version of ffmpeg, I used the following commands to convert my videos (they can be in any format) to a reduced in size mp4:

F:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe -y -i "Your movie file and path" -f mp4 -b:v 427k -maxrate 531k -ab 104k -r 23 "output file name and path.mp4"

After doing this, I no longer have issues streaming videos using my PlayBook
Now you could devise some kind of webpage for your server to use Flash or HTML5 to stream the videos over your LAN, that way you dont have to reduce your video quality.


=== Edit====
Turns out I didnt have to do all of that. I just needed a server that is less load on my PC, I am using microapache now and it works great.

[TheNerdfly]

no need to run a server or re encode to stream video files, in fact it works faultlessly without doing so. Also when you run a server on your pc it is working overtime, while this method hardly touches the cpu. Simply install ES File Explorer (you'll need to sideload this) and network share your movie folder on your pc. ES file explorer will display all shared network folders on your playbook and can play .avi files no problem. You will need to long press any icon for an .avi file and choose 'play as' and then 'video file' while mp4 videos will play with a single click.

[chrisgotabb]

Hey Nerdfly, I tried ES File Explorer out and its an awesome app, but since its not a true PB app I found it pretty buggy so I'm sticking with my apache setup. Luckily I found THIS thread, where someone had success using MicroApache. I tried it out and it solved all my issues