buffering

Preloading data into a reserved area of memory (the buffer). In streaming audio or video from the Internet, buffering refers to downloading a certain amount of data before starting to play the music or movie. Having an advance supply of audio samples or video frames in RAM at all times prevents disruption if there are momentary delays in transmission while the material is being played. Even a live broadcast would have a few seconds of delay built in. See video streaming and adaptive streaming.

Buffering Over the Internet
If a network is fast enough to keep up with playback, buffering is not necessary. However, this is not the case over the Internet where packets can traverse numerous routers from source to destination, and delays can be introduced at any juncture. See double buffering, buffer and buffer flush.

Filling the Buffer

The message means 70% of a reserved area in memory is filled at that moment. When it reaches 100%, the software (Windows Media Player in this example) will start "playing" the video.

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Buffering

the ability of soil to resist change in its reaction (pH) under the influence of acids and alkalies. The more salts of strong bases and weak acids present in a soil solution, the higher the buffering of the soil in relation to acid fertilizers; salts of weak bases and strong acids are buffering to alkali fertilizers. Since the solution is in constant interaction with the solid phase of the soil, the latter also exerts substantial influence on buffer action. The more colloid particles and humus in the soil (for example, chernozems) and the more absorbed bases they contain, the more buffering the soil to acid fertilizers; hydrogen absorbed by colloids (podzolic soils and krasnozems) fosters increased buffer action to alkali fertilizers. Heavy (clayey) soils have the highest buffering. Atmospheric precipitation and ground and irrigation water may change the reaction of the soil if it has no buffer action; on the other hand, if the soil has buffer action, these factors cannot change its reaction.

Plants react to changes in soil reaction. Hence, soil buffering plays a large role in their growth and development. Soil buffering may be increased by introducing organic fertilizers.

N. I. GORBUNOV

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References in periodicals archive

According to the collision mechanical analysis characteristics of solid filling materials and buffering devices, some simplifications and assumptions be made to establish a collision mechanics model for solid filling materials and cushioning devices.

Through collision theory and rock dynamic characteristic [15, 16] test research, the collision between the solid backfill materials and the buffering device is divided into two cases, the elastic collision and the plastic collision.

The force and deformation formulas of the elastic collision between the ball and the buffering device obtained in the elastic stage are substituted:

Vibration and Dynamic Response of Buffering Devices during the Vertical Feeding of Coal Mine Solid Backfill Materials

Which of the following buffer systems has an equilibrium point (pKa) closest to normal plasma pH and has the greatest buffering potential for plasma?

Which of the following buffer systems contributes most to the buffering of plasma on a minute-to-minute basis?

Renal regulation of acid-base balance

The UNIX file system employs a separate mechanism designed to allow the buffering and caching of logical disk blocks (and more generally, data from block-oriented devices).

No support is provided in UNIX systems for buffering and caching at the user level.

(2) Multiple buffering: The lack of integration in the buffering/caching mechanisms may require that multiple copies of a data object be stored in main memory.

IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System

On-chip (FPGA) data buffering is essentially required along with NPS to accelerate its performance on FPGA platform.

For real time applications, FB is more appropriate buffering scheme but at the cost of additional memory resources.

FPGA Based Compact and Efficient Full Image Buffering for Neighborhood Operations

In Section 4, we evaluate the performance of proposed Dynamic Buffering scheme by comparing it with CoopNet to show how effectively Dynamic Buffering scheme addresses the asynchronous arrivals of peers and how much workload can be shifted from the streaming server to peers.

In this section, we describe proposed Dynamic Buffering scheme and show how it assists peers to retain the initial part of the received video stream, thereby prolonging the expiration time of the peer's service capability.

Improving the availability of scalable on-demand streams by Dynamic Buffering on P2P networks