text: slow media player? i have a fast, high spec computer, and everything else is running great and fast, but when i try to play movie clips of any kind, they take an age to start, around 30 - 45 secs sometimes. very occasionally, about once every 10 clips, one will start straight away. its not a copyright issue, as it does it with any free to download clips from the wen. its not just windows media player, same happens if i try to open them in real player or similar. i have the latest versions of all software. any suggestions? the download is the key. if it happens when you  are watching streaming video (straight off the net) then its most likely to be a connection lag. this is where the download stream is not quick enough for the playing stream and it will pause to wait for more of the video to download before it tries to play it.  only option for that is to wait until it is fully downloaded before trying to play it, simply push the pause button until it no longer says "buffering"  if its not downloaded video check that you have all the relelvant codecs installed as it may be searching the internet for them before attempting to play them. it also uses the first ones it can grab hold of instaed of finding an exact match.  to test this theory find a programme called "gspot" and open it and point it to the video you are trying to play. this will tell you what the codec is and wether you have it on your system  note: this will only work for files already on your system, not streaming files