Odd Netflix issue - X-High/HD no longer available - Page 11

People say that different devices get routed to different servers. Inasmuch as Netflix claims that they do 120 encodes for each title, it's reasonable to believe that different sets of encodes for the various platforms are hosted on different servers.

I just tried monitoring the connections made by my Roku 2 when running Netflix by looking at my router's log file--it's a bitch. I'm running Tomato on an old Linksys WRT54G; it doesn't have a realtime display of connections. Perhaps there are routers which do, with node filtering; perhaps you have one of them .

During the recent Christmas outage, there were many reports of some devices having access while other devices did not. I saw that here as well. My TV with its older Netflix interface had a connection while my Oppo did not. That's pretty credible evidence for traffic steering. And it wasn't about getting a good stream vs a bad one, it was connection vs no connection.

I've looked over my Netgear settings and can't find any way to do that.
During the outage none of my computers / devices worked. After the outage only the main Blu-ray player (LG BP620) had the picture quality fluctuations. The other blu-ray player (older Panasonic DMP-BD85K with old Netflix UI) and computers were fine. I'm thinking LG routes Netflix a little different on their players / smart devices and may have it tied to their LG Apps. I remember that during the Christmas outage LG Apps were unavailable too.

Well I am annoyed but its not that bad since I have a backup device. I had to watch Netflix yesterday and today on the laptop using the Windows 8 app because the useless PlayStation Network is still down for maintenance. They push it back about four times already. First they said it would be ready yesterday at 11:PM EST then they pushed it to the middle of the night. Then they pushed it to 2 PM. Then they said it would be up by midnight tonight just to push it back to 5 AM. It better be up by tomorrow because Saturday afternoons there is nothing on TV. As I will say I don't care about playing games online but to have to be signed into PSN just to use Netflix is stupid and with these PSN maintenance (really outages) I will find another streaming device.

To bad I could not hook up my laptop to my TV. I tried it but it showed a picture on my laptop and TV screen and when I tried the Netflix app it was delaying the image. When I tried to watch something it just showed a error message until I disconnected the HDMI cable from the laptop and then it worked after that.

Qos > View Details

I've been getting nflixvideo the past couple days on different devices. Who runs that?

Cool! Thank you very much!

Servers in that domain are in Netflix's single purpose Open Connect CDN; your ISP must be one which has signed up for connection to that. You can get Netflix Super HD and 3D video encodes which probably 90% of US Netflix subs cannot.

I'm on TWC and I can confirm I'm only getting High/HD on PS3. Weird

They must use it regardless, but require peering agreements (or whatever) before getting higher encodes.

I still think is it plain stupid that 90% of ISP's even the three big major ones can't get Super HD. I don't care much about Super HD anyway since sometimes I even have problems to maintain a High/HD stream. Still not as bad since the 2.11 update finally as the previous update was just plain terrible.

I'm having the exact same problems with Netflix on the PS3, in the Washington DC area, with an ISP that's part of the open connection. Problems began about a month ago. I spent hours on the phone with Netflix customer support (terrible -- Netflix doesn't allow the tech support to speak directly to customers; rather they talk to the customer reps, who are more conversant with billing issues, and those folks relay info incorrectly). They told me it's my ISP, and that the netflix signal is hanging when Netflix transitions from the SD signal to the HD signal in the course of loading. What happens is that the red bar goes about one-third full, then pauses for a while (15 seconds?) and then goes to 99%, where it stays stuck for 1-2 minutes. Then I'm stuck with the Low-SD signal.

It's not my ISP. I uninstalled the Netflix app, changed my DNS provider etc. Other apps with higher bitrate requirements (Vudu) work fine on the ps3. Netflix only gives me the unwatchable SD-Low feed, and then frequently stops to rebuffer during playback.

If you figure out the problem, please post!

My issues have gotten a little better, there are times I can lock into the HD signal with no problem. Signal ramps up in about 30 seconds and stays there. Other times picture quality varies throughout movie/TV show. This weekened I watched an episode of Star Trek TOS and 30 Rock with a signal locked in HD. The one episode of BBC's Wallander was all over the place picture wise throughout whole episode; from Low/SD to High/HD and all over the place.

Can you go online to Netflix and under Your Account, check the Manage Video Quality setting and see what it's set on? If you had it set to High, cycle through the other settings, then return it back to High, and see if that makes a difference. 

Westly-C, thanks. It had originally been set to high, then I think that the Netflix rep changed it to medium. That didn't fix anything. I brought it back to high, and it's all still the same.

I should also note that Netflix's explanation that something is going wrong with the HD streams (not merely super HD, any HD) seems correct. Netflix works okay on the PS3 on programs that are only offered in SD (old Sesame Street episodes). If the program is offered in HD, the PS3 hangs for a couple of minutes, and then shows SD-Low with buffer problems. .

I usually don't have any problems watching Star Trek TOS as it stays in High/HD. However BBC series like the new Doctor Who gave me problems but I finished the series so I don't know anymore.

Where would I look on the Netflix site to find the bandwidth limit interface? I'm going to look now, since I didn't know there was such an interface. I've only had streaming for about a month and a half.

Floyd

I find it very interesting that this thread started back in November. It makes me wonder how Netflix decided which shows they would update to the new encodes first. I was getting X-High on Lost and many other random shows I would try until mid-January. I have been using my Roku much more in the last few months to free up my PS3 for gaming. I primarily watch Private Practice and Grey's Anatomy right now and I noticed the quality jumping around even though my connection speed was consistently over 10 Mbps with a show running. I thought it was the fact that the Roku has a poor antenna, but may be it was a little bit of both.

I'm actually surprised that they didn't do them all before introducing Super HD (except for the ones which they're only allowed to present in 720p). I read at some point that it took about 3 weeks to re-encode their entire library, using a mass of compute servers in Amazon's AWS cloud.

Thanks, I was poking around after I wrote that post and found it. I also found a place to "Register Your Device." I looked and found a Netflix ESN: that is 18 characters long in the menu for my LG BR player. When I entered that number on the computer, it told me activation had failed. Both the computer and the DVD player were on and internet connected, so I was puzzled. I've been watching streaming for two months, wouldn't the device be registered for it to work?

Also, when I select Netflix from an assortment of providers, there is a red Netflix screen with five bars. One bar is displayed as larger, indicating it is on that bar, but it jumps around like a cat on a hot stove. Whichever bar it stops on before it goes to the play menu seems totally random. It can be at the highest bar, and I can do it again in 15 seconds and it might stop on the left most bar or the middle. Is this just something to keep me entertained while it loads?

I also noticed for the first time that movies have an HD, SuperHD, or blank listing by them, and that if it is in 5.1 that will be right next to that slot. When I selected the highest speed rating in the bandwidth settings to maximum (up to 1 GB per hour, or up to 2.3 GB per hour for HD), there was some improvement, but nothing earth shaking.

Any other tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated. Forum members here are really quite helpful. So thank you.

Floyd

An activation code is usually generated by the NF app upon first activation or after resetting the app (that you would then go online an enter at the site). I don't know for sure, but I don't believe that 18 character number would be your code. I don't remember any of my codes being that long (but I've never owned an LG player).

For those few platforms using activation codes it's usually about 6 characters long. Most commonly now they make you log into your Netflix account using those stupid on-screen keyboards with arrow keys and a select button , which doesn't require that you have a computer nearby. Since I always do have a computer nearby I much prefer the short activation code model, but that's just me (hell, you could get to their site on your cell or tablet to enter a short code).

The "manage video quality" setting is pretty much useless since anything lower than the maximum setting won't even get you the highest quality standard definition video. If you want to see how quality changes as it ramps up through the encodes at various bit rates, watch "Example Short 23.976" which has a bit rate/resolution label on each of its constituent encodes so you can tell what you're seeing at any point.

Yes it is useless as Low/SD looks horrible on any TV.

Thanks for the link Michael. But check out some of the user reviews. Absolutely hilarious.

How do you find this stuff?


Ian

Just like you do--people like me mention them in online forums . Someone mentioned it in one of the Roku forums and I've since spread it far and wide.

I think I did the onscreen activation. I agree with the "video quality" section. 3 mb doesn't seem very much to me. That short example is interesting. There are several clips, and each clip starts at some horrible resolution and then goes to 5800 bits (if memory serves). If I'm understanding how to use the example clip, each scene will start with the lowest and proceed to the highest. If the connection doesn't fluctuate, it will stay at the highest until it moves to a different scene. That's what I'm seeing when I watch.

Just being nit picky, but I would say that Netflix seems a little low on contrast and sometimes saturation. But some material on what they now call high hd, the picture is fairly close to satellite 1080i. Some material like episodes from Star Trek Enterprise look like something Mr. McGoo would see. You can encode any material at an HD presentation level, but if the original was recorded on an 8mm camera, it's still going to look that way. One movie, Predator, really hacked me off on a BR disc. It was obviously a DVD quality source with the sharpness cranked up to high noise.

The entire clip has encodes at each of the possible bit rates--since you're one of a tiny number of people in the US with access to Netflix's Open Connect CDN and therefore the Super HD encodes, you will see up to 11 different encodes (if you're not in the US then you're not so unique). The numbers should ramp up to the highest sustainable by current conditions on your connection to the servers and just stay there; the bit rate should not change as the scene changes. If that's what you were seeing then there were fluctuations in available bandwidth on your server connection(s), forcing the player to back down into lower bit rate encodes for a while.

Predator??? The 1987 Schwartzenegger science fiction film? You must be outside of the US, since that's not available for streaming here. Someone in Latin America mentioned trying a couple of pretty recent films that we didn't have. Where are you? EDIT: I see from your "name tag" that you're in Fort Worth. Where are you getting Predator from?

They probably were given the BD as a source for encoding. Its review at High Def Digest gave it 2 out of 5 stars for HD video quality.
Edited by michaeltscott - 2/3/13 at 11:23pm

It is assumed that you are referring to Dish Network or DirecTV. I watch quite a bit of PBS via satellite and can tell you that I have never seen anything close to the same quality via Netflix streaming. One needs a 1 meter satellite dish and FTA DVB-S2 satellite receiver in order to view PBS programming. The satellite is AMC-21 located at 125° West, transponder 24. All the HD programming is H.264 (MPEG-4) at 12 Mbps and the audio is Dolby Digital at 448 Kbps with dialnorm set to -31 (unity).

Netflix at there highest stream I can get which is High/HD looks better than Dish Network HD channels which look more like Medium/HD well maybe the premium channels like HBO look as good as High/HD.

I'll have to watch the short clip again. Maybe it only cycles up to 5800 and stays there. I probably am seeing 11 different encodes, There is something called PAR 1:1 which is unfamiliar to me. For Predator, I was watching a BR disc. However long ago that was, it was something I had looked forward to in BR and it was horrible. Streaming is new to me, so what is Netflix's Open Connect CDN, and how did could you tell that I had it?

Floyd