Netflix streaming quality - Page 85

I had no issues streaming in HD from Netflix last night. It was rock solid which is the norm.

Ditto. Streamed all day (don't judge me...it was raining) on my PS3 with no issues at all.

Given his issues that appear to be only Netflix, I'm guessing it's something between him and Netflix (or the Netflix servers he's connecting to). To xcrunner529, there's a lot of internet between your house and Netflix, so it could be Netflix, the ISP, or anything in between. It could very well be something with whatever Netflix server farm you're connecting to and the CSR you're talking to has no idea (they're just first level support). It could very well be they aren't even having issues but the traffic is hitting a bad hop somewhere along the line before it gets to you. Your connection to any given website/service will only be as fast as the weakest link, of course.

Where are you located at?

Regardless, glad it's not me.

Exactly the same thing that happened to me. Netlix reps tell me I'm streaming at speeds that vary from .25 to 4.8 meg. Vudu and Amazon tell me I'm streaming from 8 to 12 meg. Too much of a differenc to make sense. I'm now convinced that the Netflix reps either don't know what they're talking about or they just measure their streaming differently because I haven't had buffering issues and the quality has been very good on Netflix.

I did run into my first problem yesterday. I was doing a lot of streaming due to the bad weather and in the middle of a movie on Netflix, it started to buffer and couldn't get the movie back. I went into to BD system and realized it couldn't find the wiresless connection at all. So I repowered the blu-ray player and everything worked great...for about 20 minutes. Then the same thing happened again. Netlix stopped working and couldn't rebuffer, and again couldn't find the wireless connection. Once again, I repowered the player and then watched Netflix with no problem for about two hours straight.

So has anyone every heard of a problem like this where the blu-ray can't find the wifi connection and has to be powered off and then back on again and is there a way to fix it?

Yes, it's just extremely frustrating and kills the enjoyment and immersiveness of whatever I'm watching when I go from 1080P to blurry low SD and it takes forever to get back up if ever. And I just know if I bother contacting Time Warner I am going to get nowhere and get the same lame troubleshooting steps as Netflix told me (could be *insert ISP or Netflix servers depending on who talking to*, have you reset your router recently) et. al. All my streaming devices are wired, the network is gigabit, and I get the same slowness when plugging the PS3 directly into my cable modem so I really don't think it's my network at all. I am going to get nowehre contacting either party it seems like...

I am in Columbus, OH

For the last couple of days I have not been able to get x-HD on my panny plasma. Never had a problem before. Using FIOS. Highest it goes now is "high".

Have you checked using "Example 8 Hour 23.976" (or the short version)?

I am wondering if the superhighway is experiencing a traffic jamb? With all the black friday ad's and Christmas offers I have noticed a slowdown of highspeed net even though I checked the "alleged" speed using the cable networks speed test......which I think is a fake and does not really do anything but confirm their published specs.

I have not noticed any slowdown. Now of course, every Sunday afternoon, the servers for diychatroom.com get really slow to the point that their site stops working. Your ISP may also be working on their infrastructure, and updating equipment also during the early morning, or having problems with bad blade servers, bad switches, but have not pin pointed it.

Just got an higher speed tier this week, At 25Mbps, that clip will not play in HD (on the pc). as indicated by the HD selector on the timeline bar. Somethings definitely up. Grr.

Check out the other thread about this. It seems to be affecting many devices.

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1440503/odd-netflix-issue-x-high-hd-no-longer-available

It seems to me that the more people who start streaming, the less the internet will be able to handle it. Once commercial business, such as banks and others become affected, I would expect the FCC to step in and limit streaming in some way.

You could be very right about the choke point being at the Netflix server. Just like any site, as it gets overloaded, it will slow down. Too many connections would bring it down. I hear the most complaints about Netflix. $8.99 a month isn't much, so I wouldn't expect much.

Floyd

That usually happens when your ISP burps .. no connection is consistently consistent 24/7 .. a short loss of feed is the likely problem ..

On a side note, I must be extremely lucky, because I've not experienced any of the quality loss / re-buffering / etc that's being noted on the thread .. running a 20Mbps Charter CATV feed .. no problems .. clean as a whistle ..

I was never able to get better than DVD quality picture and stereo sound from Netflix, so I cancelled the account. Has this improved in recent months?

Well you need to say what player you are using, when you last used Netflix and your download speed.

With a player that can do 1080P 5.1 audio it should look better than DVD if you can get the highest quality stream - which should require around 5-6Mps download with the latest encodes.

My connection is 25Mbps and I'm using my HTPC.

The Netflix web player can't get better than 720p, but there's a Netflix app for Windows 8 which can play the 1080p Netflix video encode. You can still only get mediocre 64 Kbps stereo audio, though.

Many of the BD players and streaming STBs released in the past couple of years can play 1080p Netflix encodes, 5.1 DD Plus sound and closed captions (for titles which have them). You can get a Roku 2 XD for $70 right now which will give you all of those features.

When you say Windows 8, you mean the operating system for my computer, right? It seems like yesterday that they released Windows 7.

It was not yesterday that 7 got released. 7 has been out for a while now. Do not worry, 8 will be short lived like Vista, and then 9 will do the same. I think that we are seeing Microsoft starting to grasp at straws, as Android tablets, iPads become more mainstream, and Linux is finally catching up for Desktop OS.

The Netflix app on the tile is fine for on the go, but still would not use it in place of a decent streaming device or PS3 that can stream Netflix or other streaming movie/tv shows.

Somebody in another thread (the reduced bandwidth encodes one) just called it the best Netflix player he's used; he didn't say why. I might consider using Netflix on my PC, but though the new Win8 player is 1080p capable, it continues to use the mediocre 64 Kbps stereo sound.

Why is it so crappy on the PC still? I don't want to have to buy Playstation 3's for every TV I want to use Netflix on...

I can't think of a reason why they wouldn't stream 192 Kbps stereo or 384 Kbps DD+ 5.1. They'd have to convert it to regular DD if your PC's sound interface can't output over HDMI (mine can't) but the DD+, but DD+ is design to be converted via a computationally lightweight process; my Xbox and PS3 convert it.

VUDU recently started supporting 1080p streaming and downloads to PCs, but they only support stereo out of PCs as well. Zune (now Xbox) and Amazon video downloads play in 5.1, if available for the title but they're both limited to 720p.

You hardly have to buy a PS3 for every TV; there are lots of STBs with full-featured Netflix players, like the Roku 2 XS and 2 XD and WD TV Live.

sebberry: There are some pretty cheap no-name STBs out there sold at retailers like Walmart and Target that do pretty much just Netflix and Vudu in 1080p/DD+ 5.1 in the $30-$40 range if that's all you're looking for.(I think one of them is from RCA, but don't quote me on that)

Here's why: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/08/netflix-1080p-streams-no-longer-called-x-high-company-credits-i/

I wonder what happened last night, when I was trying to watch "Whistleblower" everything was fine and streaming in HD until at about 30 minutes and around 10:05 PM. All of a sudden the stream stops and rebuffers but the indicator shows no higher bitrate than 0.7 mbps. After a couple minutes it resumed still in HD then stops as soon as the buffer ran out again. I stopped and started with the same symptoms. Checked my broadband connection which showed over 10 mbps. Restarted the BD player, same results. Tried streams on other services as best I could but those were okay. Played it on my Android device and it streamed fine in HD. So not sure what was up about that and checking just now it resumed at 6.6 mbps. It's sorta like Netflix still isn't ready for primetime. I mean it's a week night, school still in session, didn't have any problems watching another movie on Tuesday. In fact it has been a while since I've seen rebuffering.

IIRC, they are in the process of setting up their own CDN. IMO, they are headed down the same road as cable, satellite & some OTA, more, more, more content and less bits for each content.

I know there have been some previous threads on Netflix 'jittering' - but anyway...

We watched Hugo tonight on Netflix (great Movie!) - but we saw a lot of jitter on any pan scenes. Check the intro pan over Paris.

It looks like it was not a P24 encode which is probably the problem (evidence is that my BD390 outputs it as P60 but will output P24 for P24 sources).

It would be much better if Netflix would encode all movies at P24. The jitter goes away as is clearly visible on the example P24 shorts when played on a Netflix player than can output P24.

(Of course my primary Netflix player the Roku 2 is also crippled as it only outputs P60 - so even for P24 sources I have to trade 720P24 with 2.0 through my BD390 vs 1080P60 with 5.1 though my Roku 2. Best would be if the Roku 2 could output 1080P24 as well.....)

You're right--Hugo is strangely encoded at p30 and there is a lot of judder. The great majority of Netflix encodes are p24, including HDTV. Much older TV (including shot-to-video-tape movies) is encoded at 30p, but even some of that is p24. Much of the British TV is p25. It must have something to do with the source they were able to get for the movie--if the source is p24 it's easiest to encode it as p24 and more compact. (To check, play the title in the web player, left-click the player to give it keyboard focus and type--without switching to fullscreen--CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-D to bring up the diagnostic overlay. That overlay has a line labelled "Frames rendered/dropped" where you can see the rate).

So the LG BD390 can output p24 VOD sources at p24; I'll have to remember that--it's a very rare capability. This past year's Panasonic BD players can do it (though you have to turn it on every time you run a VOD app) and the WD TV Live products, but not many other things that I know of.

EDIT: I just checked a bunch of other recently added movies and they're all p24 .
Edited by michaeltscott - 12/16/12 at 4:11pm

The TiVo Premieres can also output Netflix at 1080P24. I'll need to check out Hugo on one of my Premieres since it can only pass through 1080P24 max, supposedly. So I guess with 1080p30 it would need to output it at 1080i. Unless it can actually pass through 1080P30.

EDIT: Hmm.. It would only output at 720P from my Premiere. So I guess it can't handle 1080P30, unless there is another encode that the TiVo uses.

I read the post again . You only mention the framerate and not the resolution. SO is it actually output at 1080P30 or is it 720P30 instead of the normal 24 frame rate?
Edited by aaronwt - 12/16/12 at 4:45pm

It may well be limited to 720p; lots of recent big-ticket titles are, almost all of that Warner stuff included (Captain America, True Grit, Super 8, etc). I can't really tell on the PC, since Hugo is a can-only-play-in-SD-on-PC title. It gets up to "High/HD" on the PS3, but that's probably the new "X-High/HD"; there's no way to tell, since if its actually "High/HD" is 3600 Kpbs, as is still true of some titles, the PS3 would label that "High/HD" as well as the 3850 Kbps 1080p encode (higher than the old "High/HD" but not as high as the old "X-High/HD" which was 4800 Kbps).

BTW, I captured a frame of the new "X-High/HD" (3850 Kbps) and one of the new "High/HD" (3000 Kbps) for comparison and posted them here. Not as precisely matched as msgohan's great work of the past, but interesting.