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Download Times of HD Content? Should it take this long?

I

imacericg

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 11, 2007
132
12
At 8pm, My wife and I purchased the inaugural HD movie from our new Apple TV last night and we waited around 30min for the screen to say "Your movie is ready to watch". We clicked play and was blown away by the clarity of the picture. 15min into the movie it stopped as it played what has downloaded that far. Disappointed, we switched over to Tivo and right before I went to bed at 10:30pm, it was only 1/2 downloaded.

We have 4MB internet from RoadRunner and I did a speed test (while Apple TV was downloading) and got 800k per second.

Is my Internet too slow? Are Apple's servers slow? What do you think is going on?
 
I am finding the movie download times from iTS to be running very slowly (non-HD) and I have 8Mb DSL with effective download speeds of 6.5Mbs from most sites to the computer. For some reason, however, my AppleTV downloads seem very slow.
 
I have 6mbps DSL from ATT here in Maumee, Ohio and can start playing HD rentals within minutes of purchasing them. I think the quickest was "Live Free or Die Hard" which started 2 minutes after buying, and the longest was 10 minutes over this past weekend.
 
I am thinking of calling TimeWarner and boosting my speed up for a month as a test.
 
imacericg said:
We have 4MB internet from RoadRunner and I did a speed test (while Apple TV was downloading) and got 800k per second.

Is my Internet too slow? Are Apple's servers slow? What do you think is going on?
Click to expand...

Doing a speed test WHILE you have things downloading isn't going to tell you anything useful. You need to stop all other active downloads/uploads and run a test. Go here and do the test from the nearest location and tell us what the results are.

If you're getting below 80% of your subscribed speed you may need to contact your service provider.
 
I think Vudu advertised that they needed at least a 4 Mbps connection for HD viewing, but I assume that their 1080p movies are larger.

I've never had to wait more than a few minutes, but I've seen speeds in the 12 Mbps range on a good day on the speakeasy test (I get a good cable signal).
 
netdog said:
I am finding the movie download times from iTS to be running very slowly (non-HD) and I have 8Mb DSL with effective download speeds of 6.5Mbs from most sites to the computer. For some reason, however, my AppleTV downloads seem very slow.
Click to expand...

Thats because you are in London, and apple dosn't have movie servers in europe yet. When all that data has to go through the trans atlantic cables, you don't have a chance at 6.5mb/s. For me, in toronto, i takes about 5 min for an Hd rental to start. When i tried to rent a movie in Tel Aviv, it took almost three hours (at a similar connection speed).
 
Ya'll got it easy. Here in Baghdad it took me 3 days to download an SD rental onto my computer. Think I'll stick to the bootlegs at the hajii shop for now. ;)
 
Keep in mind, an HD movie is typically between 3 and 6GB in size. I don't own a ATV yet, but I used to download HD movies from Xbox Live and they wouldn't start playing until at least half the movie was delivered. Over the 3mbps connection I had at the time, that took about 2hrs +/- (over wireless)until it was ready to play. At least Xbox didn't tease you with little chunks of the movie every 10mins
 
jb60606 said:
Keep in mind, an HD movie is typically between 3 and 6GB in size. I don't own a ATV yet, but I used to download HD movies from Xbox Live and they wouldn't start playing until at least half the movie was delivered. Over the 3mbps connection I had at the time, that took about 2hrs +/- (over wireless)until it was ready to play. At least Xbox didn't tease you with little chunks of the movie every 10mins
Click to expand...

I plan on doing the speedtest as Avatar74 suggested. I think I might have to choose the movie, then make dinner and come back to watching the movie. This defeats the purpose of the "almost instant" movie renting though.
 
imacericg said:
I plan on doing the speedtest as Avatar74 suggested. I think I might have to choose the movie, then make dinner and come back to watching the movie. This defeats the purpose of the "almost instant" movie renting though.
Click to expand...

Still, it beats waiting for Blockbuster or Netflix.
 
I ran three speed tests different times of last night and got the following download speeds:
3888K
3400K
3300K

Those numbers look great and I am thinking it was a one-time thing. I will download another HD movie soon and report.

Thanks everyone for their help!
 
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