Content buffering despite high speed connection.

[gb2012]

I've a BDP-S370 which seems to be randomly stalling on playback of web content, particularly iPlayer.  Interestingly cBeebies programmes seem to be unaffected and BBC 2 seems to have the most issues but this may just be a red herring.  Does anyone have any recommendations?  I'm with ISP Zen.

Message was edited by: Catmambo

[miffedmuswell]

Hi - We have problems too!

We bought a Sony Bravia KDL 46NX703, mainly so that we could watch Iplayer. It worked for a good few months, although we sometimes had buffering problems. However, for the last month iplayer on the TV does not work at all, although Demand 5, etc works fine. We are now lucky if it loads at all and we never get far enough to even select a program, let alone watch it. Most of the time now we just get a "temporarily cannot access the server. Please retry" - at the same time the TV plays the Demand 5, etc fine.

We have 02 broadband  - speedtest shows 10.33 meg download speed (and an A rating on the ping text - whatever that means).

Everything is wifi

Iplayer still works ok on the computers in the house - also wifi.

We just thought to set up the wii console to download iplayer via the same Bravia TV (bypassing Sony's version of iplayer) and it seems to play fine, although the quaity is not as good as Bravia's used to be when it worked. We've only watched it for 5 minutes so far though.

What is the problem? How do we solve it? It is far too expensive a TV to have it not do what it is supposed to do!

[timodell]

I too am suffering from the same iplayer failure on BDP s370 running latest M03.r.769 firmware. Problem started around 14th Feb which seems to have been when the Beeb did some kind of update. Using O2 broadband (6mbps+) and no issues with other streaming services (eg. lovefilm), Is this an O2 isse, a Sony issue or a Been issue? Would welcome a respose from Catmambo when he gets a chance. 

[secret_squirrel]

I had the problem of BBC i-player not streaming but Demand 5, Love Film etc all working fine.

The problem for me turned out to be with the Tomson IV router. Do a web search to see if problems are linked to your type of router. I'm on O2 and came across the problem with the Thomson router and i-player from 2008 O2 forum

http://forum.o2.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5186&start=75

So I first checked to see if I could stream i-player on my laptop, home page loaded ok but couldn't get programmes to play, just got the wheel going around like on the TV

I'd previously been using a Thomson VII router with O2 so I switched back to that and i-player loads on my TV within two minutes like it had been doing before I switched to the new so called faster version IV router!

[verdig]

Both BBC iPlayer and Demand 5 are now working fine on my BDP-S185.

BE broadband forum reporting that traffic has been re-routed as a fix for this problem.

Hopefully will be sorted for O2 users also as part of same company.

Strange thing is, it would always work on the PC, even BBC HD on iPlayer was fine. Just the Sony had problems.

Hopefully the fix will be permanent.

[Catmambo]

It may well have been the same for Samsung, LG etc users & O2 - the BBC have many different versions of iPlayer in use across different platforms, there isn't just one version.

But glad is back up and running now..

[Fozz101]

I have been putting up with this same i-Player stalling/buffering problem for some time.  Very frustrating.  I see that this thread is quite old.  Is there a resolution?  I have a Sony BDP-S570 Blueray player running software M04.R.878 over a Homeplug network.  ISP is TalkTalk and I normally get download rates of ~10Mb.  I have an X-box connected to the same network and TV and have no problems with this at all with i-Player.  PC on the same network also has no problems.  I would use the X-box if it wasn't for the inferior picture quality and rubbish interface compared with the Sony.  I've had the player for some time and this certainly wasn't an issue when a first bought it.  Is there a fix?  Software/Firmware update?

[blackswans]

Same here

Have great speed normally 13-14 Mbps.

On TalkTalk

iPlayer great on PC

Freezes after 20 mins or so on BDP S370

[tallkeith]

Same here

BT infinity giving 37 Mbs

Fine on the computer, but keeps freezing / buffering on the Sony Bravia TV

Been bad the whole weekend

Not good

[woody2shooz]

Another BE user. BDP S185 blu ray locks up when I try to use iPlayer

[toml220]

Just an update from my end -

Ended up switching from O2 to ADSL24, around 9months ago, and have not had a single problem with buffering since.

I had wondered if this was coincidence as the forum went quiet around the same time, but there seems to have been a recent resurgence in these posts and I've not had any issues.

The interesting thing is I'm on the 'Premium LLU' service which uses the O2/BE/Telefonica hardware at the exchanges, so theoretically the physical setup should be exactly the same.

This seems to suggest the problem lies specifically with O2 - they must be doing some sort of shaping/throttling, which seems to be at odds with their 'The Works' policy in this.