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You may have found that Internet videos sometimes don’t play cleanly –  that is, they start and stop and stutter. I’m going to talk about how to fix that problem.

When you watch a video “on the Internet”, what’s actually happening is that the video has to be downloaded to your computer before viewing. Don’t worry, Windows (or Mac or Android or whatever) will discard the video file after you’re done; you don’t have to do anything.

When you start the video, you’ll see at the bottom left a little “progress bar”. The number is the time into the video; the little green bar shows how much video has been downloaded. As long as the green bar is ahead (to the right) of the time, the video will play smoothly. The best strategy is to wait for the green bar to get at least half way before playing; otherwise you’ll probably experience some “stuttering” where the video stops and starts over and over.

Another tip for enjoying HD video is to make the video “Full Screen” – to do this, click the little icon in the lower RH corner:

This will expand the video to full screen on your PC. Don’t worry, to switch back, you press the “Esc” key on your computer keyboard.

Happy Viewing!