If your Yahoo! LAUNCHcast player is stalling during a connection attempt, it may be that you have a certain protocol type blocked that your Windows Media Player is attempting to use. To correct this, you can try forcing the Windows Media Player into using other protocols.

Certain protocols also use less bandwidth to stream content, and therefore may be able to stream continually despite a slower connection.

There are three stream types that are used by Yahoo! LAUNCHcast to deliver content to your system, these are UDP, TCP, and HTTP.

UDP is the most efficient protocol and the one you want use if possible. With UDP, our server just sends all the music directly to your computer. Your computer only needs to talk to our server if some parts of the music got lost along the way.

TCP is like UDP but instead of only communicating back when packets are missing, your computer and our server communicate to confirm that every packet arrived safely. This is not ideal because most packets arrive there safely. TCP takes up a portion of your bandwidth in confirming that each packet arrives, but usually works better with firewalls.

The last option is HTTP. HTTP is the least efficient way to stream music. Using HTTP is just like downloading a web page or song. Your player and the server have the fewest options on how to efficiently manage the delivery of the stream, but it almost always works because it is the most common delivery method for Internet content. If you have a proxy server, you most likely will need to use this option.

If you want to use UDP and you have a firewall, you can use the information in this knowledge base article to configure your firewall.

You can force Windows Media Player to use whichever protocol you prefer by following these steps:

1. Go to your Start menu and select "Run."
2. Type "mplayer2" and hit "Return."
3. In Windows Media Player, go to the View menu and select "Options."
4. Click the Advanced tab.
5. Select "Streaming Media (Windows Media)" and hit "Change."

The available protocols will be listed in this area, with a checkbox next to whichever ones are currently selected.

Try each type (deselect the others) to determine which setting works the best with your particular type of Internet connection.

You will need to close your Windows Media Player after each attempt at changing your protocols before retesting Yahoo! LAUNCHcast. Yahoo! LAUNCHcast will not stream and connect if you have your Windows Media Player application open.