Cannot get General Conference 2011 via the Internet with Windows 7

Hi,

I cannot get General Conference via LDS.ORG - i.e. when clicking on "Watch" -
when using our Windows 7 laptop.

The conference streaming window opens, but remains blank (black) while a small icon spins in the lower right corner....

But, it works just fine when using a couple of different Windows XP Pro machines.

For the problem Windows 7 machine, I have tried "everything" in the way of upgrading software, but nothing works.
I've tried this for both IE 8 - lasted version of it - also for Google Chrome - latest version. Flash Player is up-to-date. Lowered IE security options to Medium, Popup
Blocker turned off, etc, etc....

Also, archived videos on lds.org work just fine. It is only the live streaming that has problems.

And, it did not work last week for the General YW conference either....

Has anyone else experience this?
Has anyone found a solution?

Thanks,
Kelly
Colorado Springs

kpentz wrote:Has anyone else experience this?

I ran into the same problem at the beginning of the first session, so I switched to audio only. Every so often I would check back, but it kept doing the same thing. About 45 minutes into it, I tried the video feed again and it fired right up and worked flawlessly the rest of the session. My thinking is, it probably wasn't something wrong on your end.

I'm hoping they get their feeds working properly before tomorrow morning's session, as that's usually the heaviest viewed.

I had problems at the last conference with Windows 7 64-bit so had to switch to BYUTV which was ok. Another PC I had was using Windows 7 - 32 bit and that was ok. This time I came into the church's own feed later in the session and it worked ok but I might have been lucky and escaped the problem Mike was talking about.

Mikerowaved wrote:About 45 minutes into it, I tried the video feed again and it fired right up and worked flawlessly the rest of the session. My thinking is, it probably wasn't something wrong on your end.

Nothing changed to the stream--we didn't have any technical issues all day and received very few reports of issues.

We have found that on some machines disabling hardware acceleration within Flash helps things quite a bit. To do this just right click on the player, click settings, and un-check the box next to "Enable hardware acceleration".

FYI - BYUTV's stream is the exact same feed/player that is on LDS.org--just embedded on their page.

I came home yesterday and caught the tail end of the morning session. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit with Firefox and when I connected, it was instance reception. Video and Audio looked good. I then tried the afternoon session on a laptop and again, no problems.

I had 3 streams for the priesthood session and once we got things going, it work terrific. There were a few minor issues, but overall it worked great. Based on what you said, it sounds like a buffering issue or something else.

I will be trying again for the morning and afternoon session. So we will see.

RussellJD wrote:
We have found that on some machines disabling hardware acceleration within Flash helps things quite a bit. To do this just right click on the player, click settings, and un-check the box next to "Enable hardware acceleration".

I had issues with the feed skipping, and this solved it.

Thank you!

Jeff Barney

Hello,

Thank you everyone for taking the time to give your experience and ideas!

With those comments I have done more investigation and:
1. Learned that it is only my user account on the machine. Other user accounts (other family members) work just fine.
2. I have tried the tip - "disabling hardware acceleration within Flash" - but that did not help.
3. And just to make this more mysterious - I note one time when it worked for a couple of minutes on my account, but then would not work again...
4. Further trouble shooting:
a. Uninstalled various programs elements that I thought might be conflicting.
b. Compared processes running on my user account versus another account that works and stopped processes for a couple of cases that were unique to mine.
c. Compared security settings (that I could think of) and found no differences....
5. And, again, I note that what appears to be the same player works just fine when looking at the archived sessions - even of this weekend's conference.

Any more ideas...???

Thanks again and wishing you all a nice evening.

Kelly

kpentz wrote:1. Learned that it is only my user account on the machine. Other user accounts (other family members) work just fine.
[...]
Any more ideas...???

You may want to consider deleting your profile and creating it again. However, you'd end up losing everything unique to your account.

I kept experiencing pauses in the stream of about 15-20 seconds each time. My guess is that something was wrong with a given packet and it had to be refetched. While the stream never lost its place or skipped around, it did create some interesting "cliff hangers" in several of the talks while it paused for to reload the mangled packet. Next time I'll have to try turning off hardware acceleration in Adobe Flash.

Just for reference, my setup included Mac OS 10.6.7, Adobe Flash 10.2.153.1, Safari 5.0.4, on a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo MacMini.

While the H.264 steam worked great of my iPhone 3, I couldn't get that stream to work on a regular Mac even after spoofing the user agent in Safari to mimic an iPad.

Thanks for the additional input Folks,

I think I will hold off on starting over with a fresh account - since I probably won't be able to test the issue for another six months

I we didn't experience many pauses, but if my issue occurs again in 6 months, I will be more detailed about what I've got running.
i.e. Acer Aspire 5740-6491, Windows 7 Home Premium, with that IE/latest and Chrome/latest and Flash Player/latest.

Take care,
Kelly

jbh001 wrote:I kept experiencing pauses in the stream of about 15-20 seconds each time. My guess is that something was wrong with a given packet and it had to be refetched. While the stream never lost its place or skipped around, it did create some interesting "cliff hangers" in several of the talks while it paused for to reload the mangled packet.

I just want to take a minute to let you guys know that during a streaming media there is no "refetch" or retransmissions of packets. If the packet doesn't get there or gets dropped then it is gone. So the pauses you are talking about could be the result of rebuffering or something else. You should be able to continue to test because the videos should still be up at the website. You won't do it live, but you should be able to test anyway.

harddrive wrote:You should be able to continue to test because the videos should still be up at the website. You won't do it live, but you should be able to test anyway.

Hi,

Thanks for the further input.

One of the strange things about my issue is that archived videos were always working just fine - even the Conference archives from just a few hours before....
Only the live feeds from "Watch" had a problem.
Oh well....
What was most important, we got to watch Conference anyway - through the alternatives mentioned....

And, btw, for the most part, the Conference feed had just amazing quality - image and sound were perfect - even when the monitor was our 42" TV screen.

Thanks again,
Kelly

harddrive wrote:If the packet doesn't get there or gets dropped then it is gone. So the pauses you are talking about could be the result of rebuffering or something else.

I attributed the short pauses (10-15 sec) to buffering on my own machine. These occurred irregularly, perhaps two or three times per session, usually when the choir sang and the movement was more than the system could keep up with. As I watched the time after each a pause, I noticed it was going faster and making up the loss to get back to the true live feed. Again, I attributed all of this to my local machine.

I also had numerous one-second repeats (the same picture/sound repeated). After a number of them, the video/sound would jump ahead by about the amount of time that had been repeated, and that part of the talk would be lost.

The jump ahead only occurred about two times a session. After that point, the green Live button went black, and I was able to determine that I was receiving a stream at about a 30-second delay from "Live" (which appeared to be real time). At any point after that (usually between talks or when the choir was about to sing), I could click on the Live button, and the feed would, in fact, go live, skipping ahead the 30 seconds it was behind.

Then the whole process would start over. I usually made it 30-45 minutes before dropping from Live to delay, so I never went from delay back to live more than twice a session, although I ended two of them having just dropped back to delay and would have gone live again at the two-hour point.

I attribute the latter issue to both the slowness of my DSL and my machine, and a cooperating stream that felt my computer was not keeping up and just let me slide into some sort of delay mode.

Oh, the stereo cutting in and out was also probalby a result of my slow DSL and machine. And when it did cut to monaural, after a few minutes of successful feeding, it switched back to stereo if I was still getting a Live feed and not the 30-second delay.

Of course, I have no idea why any of that was really happening. Mostly, I was delighted that it worked so well.