While watching an online TV episode FF shuts down during play unexpectedly?
Hey professional people: I need some help understanding something. Here's the problem. I may go to an online TV station like CBS TV Shows. So, there I am watching one of my favorite programs like Hawaii Five O. All of a sudden during the program my notebook computer shuts down. ???? This happens when I am choosing to watch an online TV program. It's so annoying. If I use my notebook computer for other basic stuff, the notebook computer is working fine. So, what's up with this problem? I am using an older operating system which is unsupported anymore: Windows XP Media Center Edition, SP3. I know its outdated. But why is this problem occurring? Thanks Tech People!
Tech people have suggested: check power-savings menu. Turn them all off and see if it solves the problem...
Then I did this: I went to my control panel. I went to power options. I set monitor and hard disk to Never shut off. Also the same for System standby and hibernate. It doesn't stop the problem.
It seems this problem only happens when I am trying to watch an online TV program from episode (see my original posting). What can I do to stop this from happening?
Then I realized something interesting: I don't know about this, but I just noticed something interesting. Check this out. I tried again to watch an episode of the Blacklist (good drama) and I noticed that the video and audio were not in sync with each other. It was kind of like the video wasn't in step with the audio, which seemed quicker. So, me--the bright one--pauses the video for about 30 seconds. Then the audio and video were in sync when I hit play. Ah ha! So, me--little old me--decides that maybe, just maybe, this is part of the reason why my computer shuts down during the watching of an episode. Maybe the video portion of the video stream is taking too long to download onto my computer, while the audio is racing ahead quicker. Hey now, I'm no scientist, but something tells me this can be part of the problem. I don't know! Could this be possible? Maybe if the video portion drags to far behind the audio portion it causes a glitch in the computer system causing it to shut down. See, when I periodically paused the video to allow the video stream to enter my computer and I pushed play after waiting 30 seconds, it seemed to solve the issue, the computer didn't shut down. Humm. I am wondering what the tech professionals think of the realization. LLAP
So the guy I spoke to wrote back saying: I'm happy it solved your problem, but i dont really see how an out-of-sync movie can be anything else then very annoying. Somewhere somebody who is too smart for his own good will know the answer to that one, but I am not that person.
Thumbs up for solving your own problem.
However, I still haven't solved the problem: I just got done with figuring out another unrelated problem. My FF wasn't loading into my computer. I would press the FF Icon and my computer would say something like it couldn't find Mozilla run or something like that. So, I started to figure out how to use my IE8 to download FF again to my computer. Then I started checking around to see if I had the latest verison, which is now at 36.0.1 and I believe it is the latest version of FF. So, I am happy about that. I continued looking around and found the Firefox Health Report. It said that it crashed on Wed 4 Mar 15. This probably caused my problem getting it to run again on my computer. But then, I thought to myself...Why not ask FF about my TV episode viewing problem. Which is why I am here writing this mini thesis to you. Hope you're laughing a bit. So, I continued to read through some of the prior posting tips before actually typing this out to you. That's when I realized I am not alone in experiencing Audio/Video playback problems. However, I don't know if one of the suggested links will solve my problem. So here I am writing you now.
My episode playback problem still exists. Even when I pause the playback and restart playback about 30 seconds later, when I see the video is lagging behind the audio. You can tell when this when watching one of the actors speaking in the video. It's like the audio is ahead of their lips moving to say the words just heard on the audio.
When the problem occurs, it just completely powers down my entire computer system. And then I've got to reboot the whole system again, which as you know takes time. Oh, how annoying this is. Please help if you can. Thanks.
All Replies (3)
Have you tried watching the video from a different browser and gotten the same results? This will help narrow down if it is a Firefox issue or not.
Do you have a decent WiFi speed? Are you far away from a WiFi router? This could cause some of the lag, make FF freeze or something, then freeze and crash Windows somehow, being an outdated version with some instability...
To: Ererer
Thank you for your prompt reply. There are good suggestions in your post, which I have to make time to check out and get back at ya with results.
However, while I was eating my dinner tonight. I decided to call up a favorite episode from TV Channel 2, WCBS, and attempt watching it. Here's what I did. During the video playback, I did periodically pause the program as explained earlier in this thread. I then restarted the program to continue watching the episode. All was well for the entire 45 min program. However, I noticed something else. My computer would actually pause at some points too. I even, later on in the episode, tried seeing what happens if I don't manually press pause and restart. The computer seemed to do that automatically.
Now, I am not sure about this, but maybe when I re downloaded FF because it crashed a couple of days ago (see above post comment), maybe it reset or renewed or supplied a new code for playing back episodes of TV programming online. I don't know. I'm just guessing here. I'll have to let you know how things go over the next few days when I have time to watch another online episode.
Keep in mind, however, even while watching my episode tonight, I noticed that the video kind of was still as the audio continued to play its sound track. Yes, this is wierd, isn't it?
I'll have to investigate what you've suggested in your post. For the moment, however, I don't recall exactly if I tried using a different browser to view an episode. I might have in the recent past tried, but I don't recall exactly. I'll have to look into this further and get back to you.
I don't really understand how to check my WiFi speed? However, I am not far from my router at all. Matter of fact, my computer is wired directly into it right next to my desk. I know I can go wireless, but I choose to stay wired. My printer is wireless connected to my router, but that is not really effecting this situation.
Yeah, I know my system is outdated and may have some instabilities, but this situation really should not be happening. Matter of fact, if I call up an episode then I should be able to watch it online without any issues at all, just as if I watched it on a TV channel.
Humm, well see what else I can find out. Stay tuned!
Wed 11 Mar 15 (~6am EST) (Update on my progress to solve this problem)
Ererer said
Have you tried watching the video from a different browser and gotten the same results?
So far, the best I can judge on this question is that I tried using IE8. Now I did get a better response while viewing it in IE8. The episode did play for a longer time before the computer shut down.
Do you have a decent WiFi speed? Are you far away from a WiFi router? This could cause some of the lag, make FF freeze or something, then freeze and crash Windows somehow, being an outdated version with some instability...
Now, I do believe I can eliminate my router being the problem. Because I recently found out that I can watch tv episodes on my Kindle Fire HD (3rd Generation). They have a free CBS app. I tried it, and it works fine on my Kindle. Therefore any concerns about WiFi speed is moot.
Get this: While i was just typing out this response my computer shut down. I had to reboot my system to get back at finishing this post update.
Ok tech people, where do we go from here? How can we troubleshoot this problem further?