How long I’ve to wait for view my streaming (youtube, megavideo) online movie without stops?

Well is pretty simple, you just have to know two things:

* The lenght of the streaming in seconds.
* The proportion between your bandwith rate (Kb/s) and the streaming encoded bitrate (Kb/s).

The first is trivial to get, for the second we can get it indirectly.

That proportion bandwith/bitrate is the same proportion that the inverse of the delay time you have to wait between a stop and a resume.

So the time you have to wait for buffer fill enought to view the movie flawlessly is:

buffertime = movielength (1 – 1/(delay))

Example:

I want to view a movie witch length is 1:39:17 that’s 17s + (39m x 60s/m) + (1h x 3600s/h) = 5957s

I’ve detected 5 seconds between an stop and a resume, so I need to wait:

5957s x (1 – 1/5) = 5957s x (1 – 0.2) = 5957s x (0.8) = 4765s = 1:19:25

Then I have to wait the buffer fill 80% of the bar to view my movie without stops. Meanwhile I can be doing some popcorn and not wast my time waiting front the screen!

I hope be usefull.