Netflix streaming quality - Page 4

my TivoHD streaming has been 100% flawless so far in a week's time. I haven't used my 360 for it much, easier to use Tivo since I watch TV on it anyway. The HD looks really good, even for a Blu-ray "rating" person like me. Great for free streaming.

It sounds like you've eliminated the player as the cause since you've already tried overriding the stream selection, and even replacing the Roku box, with no improvement in picture quality. That appears to leave Netflix stream availability as the possible culprit.

Roku forum members have reported a number of scenarios where the HD streams became unavailable from the Netflix CDN servers. The causes don't seem clear and the HD stream usually gets reinstated sometime later although there's no outward indication of when or why the stream availability changed.

Note that the Roku stream override can only select the closest available stream quality. So if you choose 3.5, but the HD streams are currently unavailable, it will keep stepping down until it find the first available feed. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to see when this happens because using stream override also turns off the speed debugger display window.

How about other HD shows besides Heroes? Does The Office or Superman II also look bad (they both should have 3.8 HD streams)?

The problem started with Heroes. Now all HD stream picture quality is well below SD DVD PQ and SD streams are like watching Youtube video.

How about if you turn stream selection back to automatic, but leave playback debugging on. That should allow Roku to auto-select the stream but still report back which stream got selected. For Heroes or The Office does it indicate that 3.8 Mbps stream was used?

If Roku debugger says the 3.8 steam was actually used but the quality is still poor that does seem to point back to something in the Roku player to TV equipment linkage. Are you using Component or HDMI for your connection to the TV? I remember a Roku forum note regarding degraded component quality from one of the dot releases, although I believe it was subsequently fixed (and the degradation reported didn't seem to be so severe).

Stream selection is now set to auto with debugging set to on. Roku reports HD stream of 3.5 or 3.8 for HD, depending on the movie I select and 1.5 Mbps for SD DVD and always 4 Dots HD for HD and 4 dots for SD. Still can't get acceptable picture quality.

Click here to see the PQ of the Roku before the issue started. Screen size is 92". >>>> http://s989.photobucket.com/albums/a...nt=Roku001.jpg

I can see why you wanted to get hold of a Samsung or LG netflix player, that would help determine whether your Roku has some odd mutant firmware problem, or whether it's really a Netflix stream issue of some type.

One longshot test might be to reset your household router's DNS lookup to use some far off DNS server. That can force the Roku box to use a different Limelight CDN server location, just on the chance your local Limelight server got loaded up with mislabeled stream bandwidth. Still, that seems like a longshot, since you're seeing degradation across both HD and SD streams...

At this point I will try anything. I will give it a shot.

You've viewed some streams which looked great before and the PQ is now poor, though Roku reports that it's getting the HD streams? Can you take pictures of those same scenes in your Photobucket collection with now reduced PQ and display them so we can compare?

If you're getting poorer PQ for the exact same content, it really seems like it has to be something wrong in your hardware, since Netflix is almost certainly delivering exactly the same set of bits to your Roku. What you could really use is another Roku to try.

I tried another new Roku but no change.

Then you eliminated at least one element from the equation. Have you tried a different display?

No, I haven't. Since PQ from both my SD DVD and blu-ray palyers are OK, I don't think this is a display issue.

I have had a similar issue at my house with netflix. I have a 12mb ATT Uverse connection and netflix used to stream beautifully. Lately it looks like VHS quality... it doesnt matter if I use my pc or ps3 with playon or laptop I get the same horrible quality. I've tried messing with every setting I can think of. I'm convinced its something messed up on netflix side or something to do with the recent silverlight update.

I watched the entire The Legend of the Seeker series over the past few months on my XBox 360, and the picture quality has been absolutely remarkable.

I fired it up again a couple nights ago, and looked at the bandwidth in my Tomato router, and imagine my surprise when I see that it is streaming 9 to 10Mbps from the WAN port. Nothing else in the house was using bandwidth at the time. This was just Netflix.

The PQ of this show is spectacular. I'd say it is better than it looks over an antenna.

I took a couple shots of the screen, but it is hard to get a good shot of an RPTV:

I have an update to my earlier report. I am using NetFlix over a DSL line that averages about 2.5Mbps to 3.5Mbps. My player box is a TiVo-HD set up to pass through the source resolution without scaling. I was playing the online version of Groundhog Day last night (1080i60 HD source). I twice experienced a video lag where the video was approximately 3/4ths of a second delayed. I pressed the Pause (II) and then Left to return to the NetFlix screen menu (Resume Playing/Play From Start/Remove From Instant Queue) then pressed "Resume Playing", the audio/video synced up and were once again correct.

I believe I can associate this problem with two conditions BOTH of which must exist to have the problem: 1) DSL throughput degraded to below 2Mbps (happens only on weekends) and 2) 720p or 1080i online content.

hmmm... no recent degradation in pq here... fios (20mb) for internet, roku player for device...

that's for both sd and hd...

Hi..can an body help on this please....

Just go a new X550N wireless router from ZyXel......need good reliable modem to work with this for streaming netflix.....will start with Ethernet and then try wireless N.

So, Any suggestions a on good reliable modem that with pat with the Zyxel X550n ???

Thanks...

Well, to start with, tell us whether your Broadband connection is via Cable or DSL, it makes a difference on the type of modem you buy.

Where are you guys seeing the quality bars? When I play something, it says determining your video quality, but it doesn't show anything that indicates what it determined. The same happens if I use the WMC plugin. I'm on Windows 7 so it's using the Silverlight player.

I get the same thing. I asked the same question on this thread but no one responded.

You don't get them on the PC (at least the Silverlight player). The bars show up on Roku and the XBOX, and probably the Blu-Ray players (but not sure on that last one)

Everyone's using the Silverlight player on the PC and have been for quite some time. They gave people a choice of whether to upgrade while they were beta testing, but that didn't last long. It's supposed to be able to dynamically adjust quality both up and down as the speed of your connection to their server fluctuates. The new Smooth Streaming version of that tech does it without pause, while the older stuff pauses briefly to rebuffer when switching to a higher or lower bit rate encoding. (The Smooth Streaming tech is pretty impressive--if you haven't tried it yet, you can check it out here).

Netflix hasn't deployed the Smooth Streaming stuff as yet and haven't announced any intention to (it's a major undertaking, requiring generation of new encodings for everything). Microsoft's going to roll it out for the Zune Video Store in a new release of the Xbox dashboard next month. Hopefully Netflix will convert at some point.

It'd be great if they added a quality meter to the PC player, perhaps one that you could turn on and off during playback (like the overlay performance graphics in that Smooth Streaming demo that I linked to above).

Many of us already have the update (myself included)

I haven't yet tested the smooth streaming stuff yet. Maybe I'll watch something tonight, but am trying to find out if all HD videos on the Zune Marketplace use it or if it's only certain titles. I don't want to spend $5 renting something only to find out it's an old 720p encode or something.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out yet. Will post back if/when I do and when I watch something.

Hey! I was in the beta test for the last release--I didn't receive any kind of announcement for this one (actually, I think that I read about the call for participants in the last one online ). I just found an announcement on some blog--unfortunately, it's closed now (the last one seemed more or less open). Oh well--it should be out within a few weeks.

I have tried out the smoothstreaming stuff (but only 720p content). The guild episodes are in the zune marketplace for free so its a good "test" for smoothstreaming. It works really well... takes about 5 secs to jump to hd quality on my 8.0 mbit connection.

Im also gonna try one 1080p movie as well but havent gotten around to doing that yet. But I was very impressed based on my 720p test.

I'm about 1:15 into Fast & Furious using the 1080p smooth streaming.

Very impressed. Will probably start another thread with more details after I'm done since it's not Netflix.

they also show up on the Tivo HD

How do you check on what version of Silverlight you have with what version if any of smooth streaming and what is the latest?

Jack

Just play a video in the PC web app and right click the video display. A pop-up with a single button labelled "Silverlight" will appear and if you press it a dialog labelled "Microsoft Silverlight Configuration" will appear; version will appear on its "About" tab (mine says 3.0.40818.0).

Thanks for the info. I checked and mine is the same. I guess we will have a new version shortly.

Jack

Why do you guess that? Silverlight V3 was just released in July and includes the Smooth Streaming tech, which is irrelevant to this discussion since Netflix isn't using it and hasn't announced any plans to.