Official List of Netflix Watch Instantly Titles w/5.1 Sound - Page 11

I don't know how they're streaming the stereo soundtracks, but it doesn't make any sense at all that they'd stream raw stereo PCM; they could always do better compressing it, and bandwidth efficiency is the name of the game when streaming. My guess is that they send a compressed format and the players convert it to PCM, for whatever reason. Maybe it's some format that few if any AVRs can deal with (in the beginning they used stereo WMA, but it seems unlikely that they'd stream that for audio along with AVC video).

2 channel DD+ would be dandy, but they had several thousand encoded stereo soundtracks before they made the relatively recent deal with Dolby to use DD+ for 5.1 audio. They probably just kept encoding it however they were before.

Google "ps3 netflix 1080p" and you'll get a ton of hits (like this one at Engadget). When they announced the installed Netflix app for the PS3 back in October (as opposed to the old BD-based one) they stated that it was bringing 1080p video and 5.1 sound with it, with press releases from Sony, Netflix and Dolby. You do have to have network service to sustain a 5.1 Mbps connection to Netflix's servers. (The highest bit rate that Netflix lists on their "Manage Video Quality" page: 2.3GB x 8000 Mbits-per-GB / 3600 secs-per-hour = 5.1 Mbps. It should be noted that I estimated that the 1080p encodes were 5.1 Mbps back in this post, based on some fairly wild assumptions ). Your television is only reporting what it's getting from the PS3 and the PS3's Netflix player will always output at the maximum resolution you specified in the system settings. The Netflix player uses adaptive bit rate tech which will change the encoding in use as available bandwidth on your connection to their servers fluctuates (if it does); if it kept changing video output format it'd be a mess on most home systems. My television takes a couple of seconds to deal with an input format change and what it displays while it does that is not pretty.

I installed some open source firmware in my router with a realtime bandwidth graphing feature and have been using it to study the way that various streamers use bandwidth on their connections. I've taken many measurements of various Netflix streamers that I own--you can see some here, with a continuation of that series a few post down here. The PS3 gets a stream which consumes the same amount of bandwidth as everything else when you limit its output resolution to 720p; it gets a stream at a 30%+ higher bit rate when you set its output resolution to 1080p. None of the other five platforms I've tried receive this higher bit rate stream (Panasonic DMP-BDT110, Roku XD, Xbox 360, TiVo S3 and this PC). I will try the Roku 2 XS when it gets here tomorrow--it's advertised as supporting the 1080p encodings. (Some may recognize this as a slight edit on a paragraph from another post I made today in another thread ).

Don't ever pay attention to the crap that phone CSRs will spew--they're mostly poorly paid trained monkeys. Every once in while you'll run across one with enough interest in what they're doing to learn something about it, but it's relatively rare.

As I stated in the post above, native resolution output doesn't work for adaptive bit rate streaming, unless you have equipment which can instantly and seamlessly adapt to a change in resolution. If available bandwidth on your connection to Netflix should drop sufficiently, the player will switch to a lower bit rate encoding; if it was playing the 1080p encoding, that lower rate encoding will be at 720p. If it drops even further it might have to switch to a 480p encoding and as bandwidth increases it will switch back to higher rate encodings. If it switched output resolutions as it switched encoding it would be unwatchable on my television, which takes a second or two to adapt and displays something ugly while it's doing that.

An option for the Netflix player to switch resolutions dynamically with encoding switches might be useful for Netflix subs who have expensive outboard video scalers capable of seamlessly handling such switches (assuming that they exist), but my guess is that such subscribers are a very tiny minority.

What would be reasonable is for it to switch to the resolution of the highest bit rate encoding for the title that you're watching when you start it. I'd still might get that ugly blip, but only at the start and end of a title in a resolution different from the one used for the GUI.

I'll check out the Roku 2 when it gets here (which should be within the hour ). The PS3 uses the adaptive bit rate tech to acheive streaming start within 1-3 seconds by beginning with a crappy-but-rapidly-buffered encoding and ramping up from there. If you're starting from the beginning it'll get to the maximum resolution long before the credits are over. How quickly depends on available bandwidth; if its very high it'll only take a second or two.
TiVo will only switch downward to adapt, and it stops and puts up a message saying that it's doing it, so a resolution switch would be the least part of the disruption. It will not switch back up if available bandwidth increases.
I wouldn't--buffering pauses drive me nuts and suck me right out of immersion in whatever I was watching. The PS3 switches from higher to lower bit rate encodes and back so smoothly and seamlessly it's like watching the focus of a camera soften and sharpen. It doesn't bother me. The bit rate of your line has to drop pretty frickin' low for it to resort to a 480p encode in any case.

Looks like Netflix 5.1 sound on the Roku requires an AVR which can handle bitstreamed DD+. My 5 y/o Onkyo cannot--when I select a 5.1 soundtrack it comes up on my AVR as stereo PCM and there is no sound. Both the PS3 and the Panny BDT110 can extract and play the AC3 core of Netflix DD+ sound. I've been thinking of upgrading my AVR in the near term, but still... I'll bring it up in the Roku forums--perhaps they can and will do something about it. If not this may get returned and certainly won't get a lot of use for Netflix--surround sound is much more important and immersive for me than higher PQ, so my preference would continue to be the BDT110 for Netflix. (I get nice clear AC3 from Amazon on the Roku for titles which have it).

I have taken bandwidth data and can confirm that it gets a higher bit rate encoding at 1080p than at 720p (4.2 Mbps at 720p versus 5.6 Mbps at 1080p, a 33% increase; this is an average of minutes 4-14 of Ong Bak 2, my current test standard). I'll post the graphs later, after I've had a chance to fix them up (crop them, add identifying labels and shrink them).

There's no transcoding to be done--DD+ always has an AC-3 core (another name for DD+ is E-AC-3); the box just has to extract those bits and send them, unmodified, instead of the whole thing. Like I said, the BDT110 can do it (and the PS3 can only do it, lacking an ability to bitstream the DD+ ).

Roku really ought to include this in their PRs and other advertising, parenthetically: "Support Netflix 5.1 audio (requires DD+-decoding-capable receiver)". I'm gonna fire off messages to a couple of tech bloggers and see whether they can post warnings. Not everyone has a recent model AVR.

I was unaware that there was a Roku 2 thread--sure, I'll post a link to them there.

Months back I made a million graphs of Ong Bak 2 as streamed from Netflix on PS3, Xbox 360, Roku XD, TiVo S3, BDT110 and this PC, as well as from Amazon on the BDT110 and Zune Video on the Xbox, with separate 720p and 1080p graphs for Netflix on the PS3 and Zune on the Xbox. My intention was to create a thread somewhere displaying all of them. Sadly, I haven't found the energy to do it. One day, hopefully while we're still young (well, relatively young )...

I don't know what the story was with HD DVD, but the AC-3 core is intrincsic in the DD+ encoding--there is no DD+ without that core. From Dolby's DD+ Technical Paper:

DD+ is designed to be perfectly backwards compatible. If you have DD+ decoding, you get improved surround sound and possibly a rear center depending upon what's encoded.

If my BD player can do it, Roku ought to be able to (of course, the BD player really needs to be able to do it for discs with only DD+ soundtracks).

I tweeted Netflixhelps about this yesterday and this morning they asked me what device I was using and what title I saw this for. I responded that I saw the two identical video options on both the PS3 and DMP-BDT110 (both HTML5/Webkit GUI, originally identical, now using different variants) and that I saw it on every title with 5.1 that I can find, Monsters to name one.

I haven't heard anything else but those questions lead me to believe that the two options are the bug that they appear to be. Any idiot programmer would have given two different options different titles and I'm sure that Netflix hires human factors engineers to write their UI specs.

I don't have one to test and I'm not spending $80 to own a seventh Netflix streamer (the Roku 2 was an impulse buy).

Send yours to me with a self-addressed return postage label and I'll test it and send it back to you the day that it arrives or the next, or pick up a WRT54G, install Tomato on it and run the test yourself .

Here are the promised graphs. PS3 data is presented below the Roku 2 stuff for comparison and a graph for Amazon on the Roku 2 is thrown in for good measure (best viewed with your browser blown up to fill the screen, which displays the two graphs for each device side-by-side):


Though the pattern of peaks indicate different buffering algorithms, the Roku 2 and PS3 graphs are remarkably close--402 MB received for that 10 minute window by Roku 2 (@1080p), 403.5 by the PS3.

Tomato is open source firmware for a couple of older routers, primarily the Linksys WRT54G. It replaces the firmware that comes in the router and it's the thing that produces the bandwidth usage graphs that I use for testing.