TWiT Live BitGravity, eat your heart out.

Before, I used to be able to watch TWiT Live BitGravity High (1Mbps, which is the above embed) on my 25mbps connection on my Core 2 Quad all the way until the cache refreshed after 1 hour. Now it is in an endless loop of breaking and buffering every 1-5 minutes.

I have no idea if it's my ISP or our DNS server or if it's just the fact that the BitGravity player is barely buffering compared to before, where it buffered 2-3 seconds. I've noticed now that it just instantly starts the video and doesn't really buffer at all. Ustream and Justin.tv both have scratchy sound due to encoding at a 22.05k audio sample rate and crude upsampling, making it not my recommended alternative.

I've tried using manual buffering by pausing, it still quits after 5 minutes. Oh and as I am writing this, I stand corrected, it's both the low and the high connections...

Before all this streaming trouble, I was able to watch NASA TV over the internet for over 12-22 hours. Now after 3 hours that quits. Now this happens? Come on Canada, We need Net Neutrality where our Skype packets aren't limited to the point where reliability is so low, we get disconnections and packet loss all the time... Streaming packet limiting is what will be hit next if no action is taken.

I also remember when we got KylinTV, which was kind of like the Chinese version of the Roku box, it buffered like crazy on our connection, so much so that it became unwatchable.

So, for the rare few that still follow this blog (since I might have scared everyone off with all the recent grim news), How's your TWiT Live BitGravity experience? (Preferably, Canadian people watching the stream.)

Edit: Well, someone listened probably... there's now a starting 2 second buffer on the BitGravity feeds at live.twit.tv, it no longer starts immediately.

It solved one half of the problem to do with the stream breaking, But I still get buffering breaks on my C2Q... There must be issues with my ISP... or it's due to the massive amount of traffic viewing the video all as once.

Edit #2: With a blip which I assume was the restarting of the Streamasaurous, I was able to watch 46 minutes before they went live and the buffering became totally atrocious...

Edit #3 (1/13/2010): Buffering's worse again. It's not breaking but when it buffers in the middle of receiving (not the buffer that starts the stream), it goes on for 2-4 seconds then continues. I freaking hate my ISP...

Edit #4 (1/27/2010): The problem is no longer the struggle to buffer, but dropouts... It drops 2 seconds of video as a buffer pause. Then again, today, there's 10000 people watching the stream at the same time...