Tech help

[henry d]

I enjoy listening to Virgin through my ITunes(128kbps), but recently the stream is rebuffering very regularly any idea why this is happening and how to fix it chaps ??

[Wookie]

Could be a bit more traffic on the internet that's causing it to stall and use up the buffer. You could try increasing the size of the buffer in iTunes, that might help a bit.

 

Edit:>Preferences:>Advanced

 

"Streaming buffer size" - Mine's set to medium. You can set it to "Large"

[pin]

Welcome to the wibbly wobbly world of the unreliable internet

 

My guess without looking is that something in the path from you to iTunes is dropping packets or has load issues.

 

Unreliable for diagnosing these issues it may be, but a traceroute from you to the server streaming to you, might show up a packetloss / bandwidth / latency issue :- (iTunes simply directs you to a playlist file which then streams direct from virgin)

 

Open a command prompt (Start->run->cmd [enter])

 

tracert mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com [enter]

 

If all is well you will see something like this :-

 

H:\>tracert mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com

 

Tracing route to mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com [85.159.184.42]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms some.router.at.your.provider.net [1.2.3.4]

2 3 ms 2 ms <1 ms another.router.on.the.way.to.virgin.net [5.6.7.8]

3 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms the.lat.hop.in.this.example.net [9.10.11.12]

4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms linx1.throut01.london.as34763.net [195.66.224.179]

5 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com [85.159.184.42]

 

Trace complete.

 

The second and third colums in the output are the times in miliseconds for the packets to reach those destinations (simplified explanation).

 

In this example conditions are perfect for streaming, packets are reaching from me to virgin and back again in under 3miliseconds and there was no packetloss at the time of testing.

 

Similarly ping (again limited diagnostic value for various incredibly complex reasons) might show a latency or packetloss issue on the route you are taking there and back. In another cmd box type :-

 

ping -n 100 mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com [enter]

 

This will ping the server 100 times then show you a summary of results for those 100 packets ( I have chopped the output here) :-

H:\>ping -n 100 mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com

 

Pinging mp3-vr-128.smgradio.com [85.159.184.42] with 32 bytes of data:

 

Reply from 85.159.184.42: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=250

Reply from 85.159.184.42: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=250

Reply from 85.159.184.42: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=250

...

Ping statistics for 85.159.184.42:

Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 5ms, Average = 2ms

Again here over 100 packets the average time was 2miliseconds which shows no issues with the route I am taking from work. If those figures are in the 100's and 200's or you see a number of packets lost then this could be the issue and I'd report it to your ISP.

 

Hope this helps!