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If you have been watching videos on sites like YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe and iTunes, you would have encountered jerky playback, no matter how much bandwidth you subscribe to.
One way to fix this is to use a video accelerator software which will give you a smoother video viewing experience. Freeware like the SpeedBit Video Accelerator (www.speedbit.com/video_accelerator), for example, allows you to get the same video content up to four times faster!
There are also several other web accelerator tools that can help reduce web site access times, for example, FasterFox for Firefox, SiteCelerate and Onspeed, just to name some of them. However, SpeedBit is one of the few that accelerates "live" video streaming.
To understand how the video accelerator software works, you need to look at how the Internet delivers content over long distances. It does this using what is known as a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection.
TCP, however, was invented at a time when most users accessed the Internet using a dial-up connection and the speed was limited to below 56 kbps. This was acceptable 30 years ago when file sizes were generally smaller and Internet traffic flowed mainly within the United States.
Today, however, with the growing popularity of video streaming services across the world, there is now a need to transmit high bit-rate services using TCP over long distances, for example, when video is streamed from a YouTube server in the United States to your PC in Singapore. Within this context, the earlier TCP limitation often results in bottlenecks and hence, jerky video.
Video accelerator softwares fix this by replacing the single TCP connection to the video streaming server with multiple concurrent TCP connections. This is like opening up more lanes to traffic on an expressway, and allows the video streaming data to be transmitted more quickly across the Internet.
Our lab tests show that with a 10 Mbps broadband connection, the video accelerator is able to open five concurrent connections with an aggregated download speed of 5.39 Mbps. This is two to four times the download speed of a single TCP connection.
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