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Richard asked: “My wife has an older computer. It’s a couple years old. When she’s on Facebook and wants to run a video that’s on the Facebook page, it jerks and jitters. I wanted to know if that would be a problem within Facebook or a problem with her video card in her computer.”
The video player on Facebook works fairly well, we’d say. Certainly on par with YouTube, by comparison. Could the performance of the computer negatively affect the video playback? Absolutely it could.
But so can Internet bandwidth. To stream an HD video you need a fairly stable 5 megabit per second connection. Depending on the resolution and bitrate you might be able to use less, but our general rule of thumb is 5 megabits per stream for HD, 25 megabits per second for 4K (or UltraHD) video.
To stream an HD video you need a fairly stable 5 megabit per second connection. Depending on the resolution and bitrate you might be able to use less, but our general rule of thumb is 5 megabits per stream for HD, 25 megabits per second for 4K (or UltraHD) video.
If her computer displays buffering symbols when these problems occur, That sounds like bandwidth. If it simply skips sections of the video, That sounds like dropped frames, which would point to the computer.
Does it work with YouTube or Vimeo? In other words, is this a general video playback issue or is it a problem with Facebook? If you do a little sleuthing, you can figure out what’s going on. It’s either bandwidth or a too-slow computer. If other computers on the same network are having no issues, that would probably rule out bandwidth.
It might be time for holiday shopping at the computer store, Richard!