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Downloading a movie today - 5 days until complete

L

Lumpydog

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 3, 2007
373
108
So - I'm pretty much done with "Apple TV". For the second time in as many months, my family planned to sit down and watch a movie. Popcorn popped, feet up - choose a movie to watch... and its download speed says we get to watch in 5 days... in the last hour it's managed to get to 5%.

The family has dissipated and the kids are disappointed. I'm sitting in front of a half eaten bowl of popcorn wondering why we put up with this crap.

Yes, I tested my network connection. My XBox was able to download a demo game in the normal amount of time. An internet speed test on my PC shows plenty of download speed...

This sucks.

The problem is, at this point, I'm just not going to use my Apple TV for what we bought it for... Me nor my family trusts it enough to plan a night around using it.
 
Before you go all up in arms, what about contacting Apple and complain about that issue and explain to them, in a calm fashion, that this is really frustrating.

It may also have to do with your settings on the Apple TV. Does every movie load that slowly? You could try with trailers.

Btw, if a movie loads 5% in 60 minutes it will be done in 1200 minutes which is not even a day (1440min). But still very long. I had torrents that load faster.
 
spinnerlys said:
It may also have to do with your settings on the Apple TV. Does every movie load that slowly? You could try with trailers.
Click to expand...

Trailers would not load either... The thumbnails on the "Top Movies" screen loaded one at a time over the course of a minute - painfully slow...

I rebooted the ATV - no improvement. In the last 30 minutes, 50% of the movie suddenly downloaded.

As I mentioned, I tested downloads on my XBox, and PC - they were very fast.

It's something on Apple's server-side.

My point here though. It doesn't "just work" - Two out of two times over two months - the only time I really ever depend on it to work as advertised - and it doesn't. I can promise you, my wife and kids will pass on a movie night next time - in favor of something else.

Honestly, I'm better off going to the store and getting a DVD.... Which is what I did tonight - just got back from blockbuster. I'll watch the movie with my wife after the kids are asleep in a few mins - and drive it back to the store when I'm done.

I'm not calling Apple to complain or figure out why there network sporadically boggs down - I'd rather spend my time watching a movie - which I'm off to do - the old fashioned way, on a DVD.

BTW, At this point, after renting the movie 2 hours ago, it's at 58%... Regarding your math - I was just reporting what ATV was telling me "your movie will be ready to watch in 5 days". Almost comical.
 
I think they have issues with server scaling on weekends.

For what it's worth, I rented a movie tonight (Verizon FIOS in northern VA) and it downloaded very rapidly ... ready to watch within a minute. But that doesn't help you.

My only advice to mitigate the problem would be to rent the movie in advance - which I know doesn't always work, since everybody likes a vote in what you pick, but you can start the download up to 30 days before actually watching the movie.
 
Maybe I overlooked it, but who is your isp? There have been a few threads on various forums (including here) of some issues downloading certain content from apple, with the theory that the ISP is either throttling the traffic, or that they pushed an update out to their equipment (modem) that for whatever reason doesn't work well with iTunes movie rentals and purchases.
 
My ISP (Virgin Media UK) throttles me every time I try and download an HD movie, first half works fine, second half takes hours. I buy in advance if I'm gonna use it - but it certainly does discourage me from renting.

On the plus side SD works fine for me here.

Try explaining that to the kids tho :(
 
my broadband is 10mb unlimited

since april 2008 i rented about 5 movies a month more or less 50 movies , never had a slow download,never ,never ,never.... and im doing downloads outside of usa with us itunes account.
my advice blame your isp.
 
couto27 said:
my broadband is 10mb unlimited

since april 2008 i rented about 5 movies a month more or less 50 movies , never had a slow download,never ,never ,never.... and im doing downloads outside of usa with us itunes account.
my advice blame your isp.
Click to expand...

im with you there. apple servers are amazingly fast, the ISP is the problem here.
 
Excellent suggestion

Airforcekid said:
Mine was fixed by changing my DNS to google and OpenDns works too. Your IP'S server can throttle downloads.
Click to expand...

This is an excellent suggestion. If I understand this, you go to settings/general/network and select "configure ethernet" then select "manually". Cycle through all the settings (IP address, etc) and change the DNS setting to 008.008.008.008

I'll try it out and see how this flies.

I agree that there is something going on here either with Apple or an intermediary (the ISP). Mine is Comcast. Let's see if using Google's DNS fixes this.
 
Lumpydog said:
Let's see if using Google's DNS fixes this.
Click to expand...

Unlikely in the extreme. DNS is the Internet's telephone book. Whether it takes 5 milliseconds or 100 milliseconds to look up an IP address isn't going to make any appreciable difference to a download that takes many minutes to complete. Once that IP is looked up, we're done with DNS for the duration.

A.
(who has never had a problem with Apple TV downloads taking a long time, regardless of day-of-week)
 
There are a lot of things it could be, but the reports most often include comparisons with Internet speed for other stuff, and it generally sounds specific to the Apple TV/iTunes movie download.

My hunch is that Apple has server farms in various locations with the intention that users hit the farm closest to them, and the people experiencing problems happen to be hitting the server farms with the heaviest loads, or with some other issue going on. But who knows, we'd need far more info to meaningfully troubleshoot.

Either way - there are too many reports of this for it to be a coincidence or a minor issue. I personally would not plan a Friday or Saturday night around an Apple TV movie rental, at least not without a plan B.
 
Weren't there also topics on here about routers being at fault with some ATV issues?

I rented a movie in HD on Friday night and was able to watch it in a few minutes. I paused it at one point and it wasn't far ahead of me, but it never slowed on me. Back when I had Comcast I was having a lot of problems. They got under my skin a few too many times and now I've got Dish (TV) / AT&T DSL. Haven't had nearly as many ISP problems with the DSL.
 
Lumpydog said:
Popcorn popped, feet up - choose a movie to watch... and its download speed says we get to watch in 5 days... in the last hour it's managed to get to 5%.

This sucks.
Click to expand...

I wish I had this problem ... I live in rural Colorado with a wireless ISP for internet access. Your 5 days would probably be somewhere between 5 weeks and 5 months for me. The WISP I am using has slowly gotten worse over the 4.5 years I have lived in this house. They are reaching a subscriber saturation point and seem to be happy to offer what amounts to dialup speeds when everyone is banging away at the same time. (When I work from home, I can tell when the kids get home from school!)

Now, I will state that sometimes what appears to be a slowdown can be caused by failing equipment at some point in the route between you and the server. Not all packets follow the same route. So, when the XBox is working well and the ATV is not, the problem could be a router or link dropping too many packets in the connection to iTunes servers. You can check this if you know what the destination IP addresses are for the iTunes service and the XBox service. Use Terminal and traceroute.
 
If you want to solve your problem, you will have to talk to your ISP and possibly change out modems, or tweak some settings. I had similar problems and started a long thread on this forum about it "can rent SD movies but not HD movies". Long story short, I would be willing to bet that it is definately not your ATV or apple' servers. The ISP's are doing everything they can to free up bandwith these days, so you will have to call and talk "very" nice to them and sort it out. Worst case, is to go buy another modem yourself and see if it works. also you should try your ATV at a neighbors house and see if it works there. Start eliminating hardware to zero in on the problem.
 
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