what setting need to be changed in order to watch online video

[jiam1]

I am using window xp and have my screen resolution set to 1024x768 and color quality 32bits (highest quality)
I wonder why my online viewing of video clips on the internet (Internet Explorer) is always not clear -like water color paint.

Could someone enlighten me on what other settings that need to be changed? Many thanks in advance.

[djr33]

Linking to the videos in question might help.

There are several reasons I can think of for this:

1. Your computer just isn't fast enough to handle the processing, so it blurs the images to keep up with playback. There might be an option to decrease the framerate and increase the quality, so instead of 30 blurry pictures per second you get 10 crisp pictures every second. The specifics are related to each video/site, though, and this may not be an option.

2. Your video card is the problem, and... same as above.

3. Your internet connection is slow (do you have dialup?), so it is downloading the high quality one poorly or defaulting to the low quality version to keep up.

4. The video clips, depending on what they are exactly, may just be low quality. In order to post a video on the web, it is compressed, which means some quality loss. Depending on exactly how small the file needs to be, the quality may go down quite a bit.


The only other bit advice that I cna think of is that perhaps changing it down to 16bit color might help with playback if your computer is running too slowly to keep up as that could be helpful. A smaller resolution might help too.


Again, there are a lot of variables and not much information to base this on.