If you experience choppy video playback or constant buffering while streaming video from websites, you may need to make some minor adjustments to your Windows Media Player (WMP) installation. The instructions in this article apply to Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7.

For this you can use a free service like SpeedTest.net to test how fast your internet connection really is. Ideally you want your broadband/cable speed to be:

Once you have done this test, look at your download speed to see if your connection is fast enough to stream video. If you are getting at least 3 Mbps, then tweaking Windows Media Player is the next step.

In the following steps, we'll show you which settings in WMP you can adjust to improve playback when watching video streams from websites.