How in the Tech

Test your streaming video speed on Youtube

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 17, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Internet, Networking, Youtube

A high-speed broadband connection is a requirement to get any of the media rich benefits available on the Internet; viewing videos off streaming sites such as YouTube is impossible to enjoy. But what constitutes broadband speed? Oddly, it’s not consistently defined and that leads to a lot of confusion and problems – especially on content intensive sites. Streaming media as a platform and service has matured greatly; for the most part the quality of the experience scales nicely with the speed of the connection. However, things aren’t always perfect; something Google and YouTube have realized.

The YouTube test video is designed to give users feedback to the quality of their Internet connection. While you may pay for a 5MB down connection, that doesn’t give you enough information to truly predict your streaming experience. High latency and packet loss can cause your stream to stutter and drop out – certainly not a pleasurable experience. If you are curious how your existing connection stacks up to users around you, on your ISP, or in the same city, or even country; YouTube provides a graph with that information.

By viewing the test video, feedback is provided for your connection by metrics such as frames per second, dropped frames, and stream speed. You can gather your results by clicking the Show Test Video link.

You can see that even though I feel the quality of my Internet connection is superb, I am still dropping frames. Perhaps a certain percentage of fluctuation is acceptable as I certainly have no complaints when browsing YouTube. How do your results compare? See for yourself on YouTube’s Test Video site.