I have a DSL connection. Vimeo lags more often than Youtube.

March 31, 2013 10:05 PM

I have a DSL connection. Vimeo lags more often than Youtube. Why? Is there something I can do? Chrome over Windows 7. Firefox secondary. AdBlock used.
posted by maggieb to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: I get the same issues here as well, on a fast fiber home connection. YouTube is always flawless up to 1080p, but Vimeo is really bad. I assume it's just a network bottleneck on their end, given they're not as good at infrastructure as Google is.
posted by mathowie at 10:25 PM on March 31, 2013

Vimeo seems to be the choice for large, data-heavy videos. Obviously a video involving more kilobytes per second will have more problems with lag.

What you can do is to load the page, halt the playback, and go get a cup of coffee while it continues preloading the video. Once it's a long way ahead, start playing again.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:25 PM on March 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

Vimeo offers an HTML5 player in Chrome. Are you using it?

If you're not, maybe switching would help.

If you are, maybe it sucks and you'd be better off going back to Flash?
posted by drjimmy11 at 11:14 PM on March 31, 2013

Best answer: This is probably the same issue that plagues youtube on some connections, and a few other video sites.

Basically, both youtube and vimeo use lots of round-robins to balance load between their servers by region. the problem is that certain DNS servers have outdated/limited addresses and always send you to one(overloaded) bank of servers everyone in your region on your subnet of your ISPs network is using.

Switching your DNS servers to, for example, google public DNS often instantly blasts this problem away.

I have a fairly slow DSL connection here, and vimeo plays great. I have had problems in the past though, before i switched my DNS.
posted by emptythought at 11:26 PM on March 31, 2013 [4 favorites]

You might try checking the developer tools for your browser and find out the CDN node that's serving the video stream. Add that to your hosts file as 127.0.0.1 and reload to see if your streaming is improved. The effect of this is to force your browser to try a different CDN node, as it's possible that you're getting directed to an overloaded node in error.
posted by mullingitover at 2:34 PM on April 1, 2013

I just end up using XVideoServiceThief a lot and offload the download to a clunky old Compaq Evo running Linux that sits over in a corner. On my slow DSL, I have pretty much given up on streaming.
posted by Samizdata at 1:29 PM on April 2, 2013