Sopcast uses P2P technology to transfer the media content. That means when you get media content from other nodes, you also share your data to others. In order to get a better quality of stream, you should open some necessary ports to permit inbound connection.
For SopClient, recommends open 3900-13900 ports for inbound connections.
For SopServer, must open 3900-4900 ports for inbound connections.
If your personal firewall has the automatic configuration function, for example Symantec Internet security, Microsoft internal firewall with the XP sp2, select allow or permit if you see the information to ask you whether permit SopCast.exe to access the Internet or not.

It depends on your Internet access condition and the QC (quality of client network), This period will last about 30-90 seconds usually.

If not going above 50% it might be either a channel problem or a connection problem on your side. You can also use VLC to open the channel then, see other Faq post.

Please take a look here: http://www.sopcast.cn/docs/webplayer.html

You can easily watch it on a webplayer using the link above. It's the webplayer actually. Have fun!

In this case, you get peers list successfully and exchange stream data with them, but they all have no right data to feed you, your usually have a lower buffer, if this condition lasts so much time, you will get the error message and the channel stop buffering.
This problem will occurred in some condition as below:
- You have bad connections to all peers.
- All peers have no right data because of time synchronization.
- The SopServer have quit abnormally.
- Too lower QC (quality of client network).

You maybe have bad connections to SopCast serivces and the SopPlayer didn't initialize normally. You can restart SopClient or re-open the WebPlayer page and have a try.

This is mostly due to Windows Vista. How to solve it?

*Start Sopcast manually

*Go to our schedule pages

*Copy the link manually (right mouse on the PLAY link --> copy the url location/copy hyperlink with sop://)

*Put it on top in the sopcast adress bar

*Press enter/the blue white arrow , and the channel will start

 Enjoy Sopcast again!

Yes you can indeed have this problem. Some channels only use VLC codecs. A fast guide can be found here: http://forum.wiziwig.eu/threads/5768-Sopcast-with-VLC

Or you can Download VLC first, see http://www.wiziwig.tv/softwareitem.php?softwareid=12&part=software . Install it and start VLC. To open a Sopcast channel yet in VLC: Open file --> network stream --> select http --> 127.0.0.1:8902 (the end can change to 8912 or 8903) and don't forget to press ok.. Now it will work, so if you've got this Black screen error just open it in VLC.

This problem occurred often when streaming a rm/rmvb video, and seem a bug of RealPlayer. You can resolve this problem with the following step:
- Click the “opened in external player” button at bottom right corner of SopPlayer.
- Smoothly move the Real player process bar to and fro when the video is playing.

Yes, that's 1 of the most commong Sopcast problems. You've got more instancies of sopcast installed then. Close your browser, uninstall Sopcast and make sure to remove the whole folder also. Then download the latest version, install again and it will work.

Two parameters could be used to monitor the quality of a channel. One is the quality of source (QS) and another is the quality of client network (QC).

QS stands for the quality of the channel source. The low QS value means the SopServer has the poor quality to receive the channel content and it will result in the poor quality for all of the views.

QC stands for the average quality for the watcher receiving the channel contents. The high QC value means the p2p network is great and every watcher can receive most of the channel content in its buffer.
Your can click the blue “quality bar” on Webplayer or SopClient to see the quality of a channel.

We suggest that you use Windows Media Player 10 above or latest RealPlayer to play the stream. Please check the version of your player.

Other players (vlc, Windows Media Player) may be usable, but you should open it and play the stream manually. In this case, you see that SopCast is buffering and starting to play, you can specify the url: http://localhost:8912/ to the player URL field. For a rm (rmvb) stream, in RealPlayer, you can specify the url: http://localhost:8912/tv.rm.
If you have opened more than 1 SopClient, the player port will be increased automatically. (to i.e 8902, 8922 or others).