Why am I experiencing audio or video "stuttering" and "choppiness" when streaming in Orb?

The "stuttering" effect in streaming live TV or video usually occurs when there is excessive buffering, or dropped packets, caused by difficulties in maintaining a steady flow in the transfer of data from your Home PC to your device. You normally would experience this situation because of one or more of the following reasons:

• The CPU on your PC running Orb is not fast enough to re-encode your video data and stream it to your device. Orb's minimum requirement is a Pentium IV 2.4Ghz processor or equivalent.

• Your PC's upload speed is not fast enough. If you have a broadband Internet connection, verify that other applications (i.e., peer-to-peer programs, etc.) are not utilizing a substantial amount of your available bandwidth when you are streaming in Orb.

• The device (Phone, PDA or Laptop) you are using to access your Orb media has a poor connection (due to location, network congestion, etc.).

• The device (Phone, PDA or Laptop) you are using to access your Orb media has a media player not optimized for streaming. Orb recommends WMP v.9 or higher, or RealPlayer v.10 or higher.

Orb's detection of your device's download speed is inaccurate. This is most likely to occur on mobile phones. You can manually set this device speed by accessing Settings > Speed on your mobile, then enter a lower value than what is detected, check the Remember Speed checkbox, then Save & Exit. You may have to test a few values before settling for the one that gives you the best streaming experience.

Note: if this stuttering occurs when streaming to your mobile phone, to rule out the possibility of the problem being with your device itself, point your phone's browser to http://test.orb.com and try to stream some of the audio and video files we have posted on this test site. If they stream fine, then the problem is most likely caused either by your Orb PC itself or your network connection, as mentioned above.