Netflix streaming quality - Page 75

With such a low bitrate being available, perhaps 1080p streaming is no longer even a factor when deciding on hardware. Maybe the differences in user interface become the deciding factor... In my opinion, the AppleTV2 has the best netflix interface. It is more instantly responsive to button clicks and has better screen layouts and interaction design. Yet I can't comment on how well it handles low bandwidth compared to the other streaming boxes.

What are you using to determine low bandwidth? Today's current streaming methods are far from low bitrate or low bandwidth.

"low bitrate" was referring to his parent's internet connection topping out at 1.5Mbps.

With such a little bandwidth available, the criteria for choosing a netflix streaming box could be a bit different.

On 1.5 Mbps service I doubt that you can get even Netflix's highest quality SD encodings which are themselves 1.5 Mbps; if it actually still requires 40% headroom, you'd need 2.1 Mbps service to get the 1.5 Mbps encodings and the highest bit rate encoding you would receive on a 1.5 Mbps connection would be the 1 Mbps one.

My T1 (one of my lines of service is the above (1.54Mbps available - no overhead - via DSL it's probably 1.2Mbps or so) and for whatever reason Hulu Plus looks much better than Netflix at slower speeds. Something like Starz's Spartacus looks decent on Netflix however most things are pretty bad. Especially, if you have seen the faster speeds... it's best not to. At that speed the Sony Blu-ray players were really bad as they only used two-thirds of what was available where others used whatever they could find!

That would be about half of the complaints that I have noticed with people saying that they are seeing artifacts, flicker, etc when streaming. Versus those like myself that do not do torrents, I have a 24/3 connection with my provider, and have my video quality for Netflix set at Best. Along with knowing that your mileage will vary, depending on the movie you are watching. The other night, watching "Above the Law, it streamed at around 702kbps per the U-Verse Realtime utility, compared to last night, I was seeing anywhere from 2meg to 6.5 meg. Comparing it to my U-Verse picture both are comparable and for quality worth, it is clean and decent to watch.

Watching Hellboy II right now on U-Verse on the FX HD, I am seeing about 5.7meg for the stream on that channel.

Like I said, they are currently at about 1.5. I'm hoping they are closer to 3 when Verizon replaces the bad cable/wire they have. I know that even at 3 they won't get the 1080p streams, but should be enough for maybe 720p (what I would call low or medium but probably not high HD on my PS3).

So yes, it will probably be a choice of interfaces. I will make a decision for them after they get the new wire installed and do another speedtest.

I am also looking at services outside of Netflix that will be available (Amazon, Hulu, etc). In all honesty, they might just prefer the all-in-one thing with a combo BD/streamer.

Even at 3, you would not get anything close to 720p.

What are the bitrates for 720P? Isn't the highest 1080P bitrate around 5Mbps?

Somewhere around 3.8Mbps.

I'm on a 3Mbps DSL line (tops out at right around 360KBps when totally saturated) and I would get the medium HD stream with no problem before I cancelled my account.

2.6 Mbps (what the PS3 calls "Medium/HD") and 3.8 Mbps (High/HD) and 1080p at 5.1 Mbps (X-High/HD).

That's about what I thought. Guess I'll see what they report backone the new line is in

Could someone please post the windows player keyboard commands for on screen info?

Go into fullscreen and then exit fullscreen; type CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-D. Then you can go back to fullscreen if you want.

Used to be CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-M to get the same diagnostic overlay and CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-S to set a fixed encoding. CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-M does nothing now and CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-S brings up some kind of Windows link-sharing thing (in IE). I found CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-D by trial and error a week or two ago.

EDIT: Just tried this in Chrome and it's no dice; in what's gotta be a pretty old release of Firefox (3.6.3, from April 2010) D, M and S all work. Just upgraded Firefox to 3.6.22, released yesterday, and all of those debug commands continue to work in it, though I don't think I had to do the go-to-fullscreen-and-back thing with the older version and now I do.

Going to fullscreen first isn't necessary, on my computer at least. Instead, it is just necessary to click anywhere in the video with the mouse. This causes input focus to be set to the video and subsequent keybourd input is sent to the Netflix embedded player, rather than to somewhere else in the webpage.

Thanks! You're right, and clicking on the video makes the keys work properly in both Chrome and IE (except that CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-S still invokes some sort of IE link-sharing thing ; you can get to the Stream Manager function via an item on the CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-M menu). Clicking on the video didn't seem to be necessary in IE before--the player must have grabbed focus immediately or something.

I have a Sony KDL-46EX701 46" LED with the USB wifi dongle to stream Netflix from a Airport Extreme that is 10ft away. I get 20-50 MBps peak downloads, and have no problems streaming most content on any device.

For some reason though Netflix buffers constantly on my TV? It is upload with the most recent software as well. Netflix works potentially 30-50% of the time without buffers, sometimes it buffers occasionally, and many times it buffers nearly every 30 seconds. Its frustrating to the point I am thinking about canceling my subscription.

To test out the theory if it was my TV tonight, I used Amazon streaming for the first time and streamed Thor in HD. Even with fast forwarding and rewinding, not a single glitch the entire movie, and Amazon streaming performed flawlessly. This leads me to believe its Netflix, but I of course cannot be sure as my laptop seems to stream it just fine.

How can you tell if its really Netflix, as I believe it is?

I think Netflx servers don't deliver the way they should. I have an 18 MBps connection and have a similar buffering issue on my Panny DMP-BD85 blu-ray player. Amazon works great and strams in HD, but Netflix starts out in HD (which still doesn't look as good as Amazon) and then rebuffers in SD at a lower rate, which looks even worse. Same experience on two players. I didn't go past the free trial with Netflix for this reason.

I also have a very fast connection and encountered the Netflix rebuffering problem just last night. Try resetting your modem by pulling the power plug for a few seconds. This is what Netflix recommends, and I have found that this clears up the problem.

For the first time, I can't stream a movie. When I hit the network icon on my Pan. BD65 player, it says "cannot connect". The first thing I did was make sure my internet was not down(which it was not). Then I reset the player by unplugging the power cord, and this did not help. Any ideas? Could it be a problem with my player? Thanks.

Last night on my friend's settup, Sony bdp-370 with FIOS watching a SD Buffy episode buffered at least 5 times. Often for over a minute. We had to hit stop and return to the queue and select it again to get it playing. Never happened before.

Posted this on the AppleTV forum this morning, but I figured I should put it up here as well as there are more Netflix users over here...


Is anyone not on a ATV2 having a similar issue?

I find it ironic that after having months of quality issues, things are finally back to normal as far as I can tell, but then I find functionality missing from my UI. Ugh. If it's not one thing, it's another.

My information is old but for 720P they had/have 2 encode rates: 2600K and 3800K. I have no idea what the encode rate is for 1080P but I would guess that it is less that 6000K based upon their recommendation of 8.0+ Mbps connection speed for 1080P.

Note: they recommend 3.0 Mbps for DVD and 5.0+ Mbps for 720P. There is a 1.5 Mbps recommendation but who would want to watch that on a TV. Maybe an IPad type device or smartphone.

This was answered back where he asked it:

2.6 Mbps and 3.8 Mbps were numbers mentioned in Netflix's "Encoding for streaming" blog entry, coming up on its 3rd anniversary--no update on that information has been posted. My measurements indicate that those numbers hold true today for embedded players and that the bit rate for the single 1080p encoding is 5.1 Mbps (1080p is currently only available on the PS3 and Roku 2). The PC encoding bit rates seem to have recently changed to 2.35 Mbps and 3.6 Mbps for 720p. Note that the quoted maximum bit rate on Netflix's "Manage Video Quality" page is 2.3 GB/hour, aka 5.1 Mbps.

The Netflixhelps Twitter account revealed some numbers for bandwidth requirements for the various encodings--the tweets are quoted here at HackingNetflix.com. The numbers were "3Mbps for DVD quality and 5Mbps for HD quality for the duration of the film" and (in a second tweet) "5+ mbps for HD and 8+ mbps to get 1080p on the PS3". The blog entry stated that they require 40% headroom for the encoding that you get--available bandwidth has to be greater than the bit rate of the encoding to accumulate a buffer, otherwise the player would have to stop and wait any time the bandwidth dipped below that bit rate. 140% of 3.8 Mbps is 5.3 Mbps; 140% of 5.1 Mbps is 7.14 Mbps--8 Mbps is 57% headroom, which seems a bit over the top. Whatever.

I have also been having buffering issues the past couple weeks and the quality has been not as good, it constantly drops to the lowest quality and still buffers. It's not my Internet connection thats the problem because nothing else is affected; playing games online, watching other videos online, or downloading things, they are just as good and fast as they have always been.

Went back to my friend's apt and watched part of an episode of Sons Of Anarchy using her Sony bdp-370 and it looked great. No skipping or framedrops. She also has FIOS so i'm assuming it's the same quality of stream. The display says 1080p but there's no way to tell if that's the actual Netflix res or if the player is upscaling.

Anyways, I have the same player at work. I'm going to bring it home and compare directly to the PS3'

Yes, sadly this is quite common. In some cases a reboot of all involved equipment (including routers/modems) will help, but not always. I've frequently had the experience of starting at the highest quality and then some time later, having the quality spontaneously drop, usually two levels, without any change in my network usage or available bandwidth. This is more likely if one pauses and then resumes, or if one fast forwards/rewinds. It almost seems like, at the source or network distribution point, the material isn't able to be buffered properly. It may also be ISP and region dependent, but in any case, it provides a poor experience.

I can see this being a major problem for Netflix now that they've chosen to focus the core company on streaming.

Searching for something else, I came upon this Netflix blog entry, concerning the "Manage Video Quality" account setting. I'm sure that I read that entry, but I don't recall seeing the technical details postscript at the bottom of it (difficult to believe that I'd have glossed over it, given my love of stats and figures ):

So DD+ audio is exactly twice the bit rate of their best stereo audio, 384 Mbps versus 192. That approximately 5.1 Mbps I'm seeing for 1080p/5.1 is 4.8Mbps video + .384 Mbps sound = 5.184 Mbps. Nice to know .

How accurate is this now, has it been changed? If ive got 6mbps would that clock at around the highest HD quality?

I am currently using basic internet I think 1.5 and it looks awful as expected