These FAQ items are not yet part of the official NBC Olympics FAQs - some are a little more complex but should be within the capabilites of most computer users - but we are evaluating them and they make help with a problem that you are experiencing. Please let us know if they are helpful.
If you go to SmoothHD.com are you able to watch video there? If you are then that helps us narrow the problem down to it being an issue specific to the authentication or the player on the NBCOlympics site.
If you are having a problem accessing video in Firefox please make sure you enable 3rd party cookies. This will allow the authorization mechanism to function correctly
We have had reports of some anti-virus software, firewalls and other protection software such as NetNanny causing problems watching video. If you have any firewall, anti virus or similar running please temporarily disable it and try to watch a video again to eliminate that as the problem
If you are having a problem upgrading or installing Silverlight, or you try to uninstall Silverlight and have problems PC users please review these troubleshooting steps (paying particular attention to the Webshots reference). OSX users will find instructions for both SL4 Beta and earlier version os Silverlight here.
If you are using Linux we recommend you try the Moonlight 3 Preview 2 download from here to access the NBC Olympics site
If you have any issues with the Moonlight plug=in you can contact the developers directly at their community or chat sites.
If you are having problems with video playing you may be blocked for some reason.
A tool called Fiddler may help. Fiddler is a free utility for Windows users (developed by a Microsoft employee but not officially supported by Microsoft) If you install Fiddler and run thay when you try to access a video you might see an error - either a 404 or a 403 - in the display. There are other tools for OSX such as Charles (not free, but there is a free trial) which will give you the same information
If Fiddler shows a 403 that is an "unauthorized" error. You can get this either if you are not in the US, have not completed Authentication or have a blacklisted IP address. This can also happen for users running OSX 10.4 ("Tiger") and Safari. If Fiddler shows a 404 that means a part of the video was not delivered - please let us know the video you were trying to watch (a link to the specific video would be great)
An alternative debugging method is to use Netmon which you can download from here and then after you have installed it:
If you are a Verizon FiOS customer and are experiencing issues with quality of video please check what model router you have. If it is a MI424-WR and you have "No IP for NAT - connections may fail" error messages logged in your MI424-WR's security log then you are experiencing an issue similar to the one reported here. The linked article has a number of suggestions how to resolve this issue but if you are experiencing the problem then the simplest solution may be to contact your Verizon support rep referencing the linked article.
If you are running OSX 10.4 "Tiger" and use Safari as your browser there is an issue with how cookies are handled in this combination. At the moment the only workaround is to use Firefox as an alternate browser to view the NBC Olympics site.
If you are seeing poor video quality and you are not experiencing the FiOS problem from above please check your network performance. First of all make sure you are not running other applications which use network bandwidth (eg Skype or BitTorrent, anywhere on your local network, not just your machine) or CPU (eg a background task) and then visit SpeedTest.net or SpeakEasy.net/speedtest to test your throughput. Even if your throughput is good (>3Mbps) you should check PingTest.net to check your roundtrip performance, packet loss and jitter - all of which will impact your quality of experience.
It is also worth checking the performance of your machine. On a PC press Ctrl+Shift+Esc which will bring up that task manager - from here you can see the CPU and Memory load. On a Mac in the Utils folder is the CPU Utility which gives you similar information. As the HD video displayed here requires a capable machine to display if your CPU or Memory is getting near maximum utilization then the player will automatically reduce your playbaclk quality
Do you have a firewall, proxy service or protection software (such as Net Nanny) which may be impacting your through-out
If you have the .Net Framework installed, or use any WPF applications you can use the Windows Task Manager (press Ctrl+Shift+Esc) to see if PresentationFontCache.exe is running as a service (you can also check from the Local Services list - press {Windows}+R and type services.msc to see a list of installed and running services. If it is installed it can consume a high CPU load if you are running a WPF application. The solutions are either to upgrade your version of .Net to at least 3.5sp1 or to manually disable the service (though this will impact any WPF applications you are running)
If you go to this link and click on "Connect to External Player" (don't press "Set Streaming Source" as that will play a test video) and then in a second browser tab start one of the Olympics videos.
As the video plays the SSMonitor application will show you the CPU load, buffer, frames per second playback, bit rate you are able to sustain etc.
Note: while you are watching the monitor the fps will drop to zero as the video isn't actually displaying anything on your machine, but you can toggle between the two tabs.
If you encounter an error connecting to a video it will be displayed in the trace log - you can save that and (if you have an open support request) send it to us for analysis.
If you have a problem connecting to the NBC Olympics videos, or simply want to watch a test video to see what the experience is like you can click the "Set Streaming Source" to bring up some test content.