The trick to viewing online videos smoothly

Even on a high-speed connection, when you view an online video the playback can be choppy sometimes. Depending on the format, a video can use a lot of "bandwidth" - that basically means that you are transferring a large amount of data from the video's server to your computer. Since your internet connection speed can vary, sometimes a video will play smoothly and other times it might have that stop/start problem. And if you are still on dialup - don't even bother trying.

Here's how you can get your videos to play without having to stop and let the data "catch up" to it. Just click the Pause button and wait for the download to get well ahead of the scene marker.

You can try it with this week's video below. Instead of just starting to play it as normal, click the Play button and then right away click the Pause button (that's the one that replaces the Play button when the video is actually playing). Watch the gray bar fill up across the bottom - that's the data loading. You can wait until it gets about halfway, or you can wait until it is completely across.

Now click Play again, and you can watch the video without interruption.

This week's video is a great display of redneck art - which is actually rather impressive!