Course Video Keeps Stopping or Freezing | WT

ATTENTION APPLE M1 USERS: There is a known issue with these new M1 Apple computers experiencing issues playing videos on browsers other than Safari. To watch videos in the education portal, you can use Safari or disable the "hardware acceleration" setting on other browsers to resolve this issue.

For how to disable hardware acceleration on Google Chrome, click here.
For how to disable hardware acceleration on Firefox, click here.

Note: this only applies to the education portal. Our chat room is not compatible with the Safari browser (please use Chrome or Firefox for the chat room).

For all other members:

If you're experiencing consistent problems with videos in the education portal freezing, try clicking on the gear icon on the video window and click on Quality. Then select a different quality instead of Auto, and try again to play the video.

If this does not help, or if lowering the quality significantly impacts your experience, here are other steps to try:

• Check your internet speed. Since the videos require streaming, a decent internet speed is required. Recommended speed is at least 5 MBPS. You can check with a site like this one: http://www.speedtest.net/

• Clear your browser cache and cookies: How to Clear Browser Cache and Cookies

• Reset your internet router and flush your DNS: How to Flush DNS

• Try a different browser.

• Try incognito mode on your browser (this can help if there are any plugins on your browser interfering, including strict firewall plugins).

• Check for updates to your browser or device.

• Check the Wistia status page here. The videos in our education portal use this service, so any interruptions or service issues in Wistia access can impact the video streaming.

• Make sure you don't have anything else running on your computer. You may also want to run a scan for malware to make sure there are no malicious programs running in the background. We recommend MalwareBytes, which has a free triak download: https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/

For more information on how hardware and internet can factor into video streaming, check out these helpful tips and information below from TechnicallyEasy.net.

Content Providers

In a 2014 study by they FCC, research indicated that the peak time for Internet traffic is between the hours of 7pm and 11 pm at night. Therefore, this would be when it could be most problematic to watch Internet videos.

Internet Speed

Since video files are typically large, they do require more Internet speed or bandwidth at any given time to display the video properly on your device without interruption.  Each content provider has recommended minimum speeds to view their content.  Failures to meet these minimum requirements will likely cause videos to be poor quality or have frequent stops and starts.

It is important to remember that these recommended guidelines are for one device at any given time.  In today’s households it is common to have several devices connected to the Internet at a time.

If you have one member of the household that wants to watch an HD Netflix video on a TV, another member wants to watch a YouTube video on their phone, and another household member that wants to play online video games on their gaming system, this would require a lot of bandwidth to accommodate the Internet usage.  Finding the appropriate speed to match your household’s Internet usage habits will give you the best Internet experience.

Your Home Network

Another element is your wireless router.  Many home routers are only meant to handle a couple devices at a time and can get quickly overloaded if a family full of people connects all of their smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops and smart TV’s to one router.  What you can do is make sure that you have a router that is equipped to handle a heavy traffic load if you are in a household that consumes a lot of data.

You should also make sure to secure your wireless router to prevent anyone from outside your household from accessing your network.  This will just subtract from the available bandwidth that you have to watch videos from your own connection.

Your Computer

One aspect that is often overlooked is the activity that happens on your Internet connected device.  Watching videos over the Internet uses computing resources.  Therefore, if you have a lot of programs running in the background of your system, this could cause some issues with your video playing properly.

If you are having problems playing video, another good practice would be to close out any web pages and programs that you are not using. You should also make sure that any applicable web plugins, such as Java and Adobe Flash player, are updated to their latest versions.

Removing junk files and keeping your computer virus and spyware free will also help your videos download and play more smoothly.  Malicious software can cause problems with your Internet browser or Internet connection and consequently make it more difficult to view some web content.  It is recommended that you have your computer routinely checked for viruses even if you have an anti-virus program on your system.