There are many sites where you can "road test" the speed of your internet connection [both ways], eg speedtest.net gives you a full driver console. But many folk don't realise that they can "walk the dog" themselves simply by using the right mouse button on a movie being played in Windows Media Player. WMP is my choice of "embedded" player in the current movie war and as just one reason for that choice I note you can't do this test in "Flash" or whatever it is called [so I am hoping MS wins this war].

Here is a screen shot of the result of playing the movie below and right clicking [after an initial left click of course to remove the "BillyCondom" security device on WMP], then going to > Statistics > Advanced.

In the top right box "Connection" you will see "Bandwidth in use" as 440.1 kbps. That figure is actually fluctuating between say 400 to 445 as the movie downloads/buffers/streams, and is "as good as it gets" from my own connection, advertised as nominal 512. I have purposely chosen a "high" setting [Australia 2006] of 1,500 kbps as the SAVE setting for this movie clip, in order to fully extend my lousy broadband in the test. However the classification of high/low is very much a moveable feast as internet speeds increase exponentially [well, for most of the world]. Papa John, the main guru at Movie Maker Forums, tells me his own "standard" has gone from 340 to 760 in a short time and given his own connection is 1,500 I am sure he will be updating his standard early in 2007, if not already [2 Jan 2007]. Of course it is wrong to base the save setting on your own speed as you are not the surfer, and all you can do is keep an eye on general speeds around the world in making the decision.

But to return to the example above, please go to the movie below and do your own test. Start by first disable the condom with left click and then right click etc to get to the screen above. At that stage the figure will be zero, but before pushing Start button take another look above where I have already pushed Start and you can see that Buffering = 36% and there are 3 ))) marks [out of 8] in the icon [I am using Ver 11 of WMP so you may have a different graphic]. You will see that of course the blue cursor has not moved, and will not move till buffering gets to 100%, and that will be a long/short time depending entirely on your own speed. This clip is 8mb and only 44 seconds, so it may well buffer the whole 44 seconds [of movie time, not buffering time unless your connection is exactly 1,500] before starting to display.

So please also try other movies, but what should happen is that the movie will start with say 25% of the content downloaded and your modem speed will continue to show in Statistics until the movie is 100% downloaded [at which time the actual Play position of movie might be say 60%]. At that point your Bandwidth in use will drop to zero, and also you will be able to advance the cursor, if you wish, to say 90% and the movie will restart instantly from there [because it is in your RAM and Temp File, so as good as being on your own C Drive].

It is a great pity that Billy has never given us a dual cursor to show both Play and Download position [even though I have asked very nicely at MM Requests], especially as others in the war DO. However if you go to Full Screen [by double click or Zoom, using right mouse menu] you CAN see a double cursor to let you fully know "where you are at".

Finally, once we get to a movie saved at 1,500, even if viewing directly from your hard disk, it may not play continuously if your PC is not up to it, albeit most modern PCs should have no trouble. I mention that because my 2001 vintage Toshiba laptop running at 800 MHz is NOT up to it.