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Little Disappointed

B

berkleeboy210

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 2, 2004
1,641
0
Boston, Massachusetts
Hey all,

I finally took the plunge and bought a 160gb Apple TV yesterday. Hooked it up within 5 minutes and was set to go.

I'm only using this for movies, so I began the process of syncing currently 22 HandBreak Converted :)apple:TV Preset) DVDs to the Device. No Problem. Didn't finish because I dont leave my computer on all night but it went smoothly for what I got done.

Last night I said, hm let try a rental. So I decided on I now pronounce you chuck and larry in HD of course. Clicked rent. and I wasn't able to start watching it for an HOUR.

My Connection is fine.

I was a little disappointed that a "minute or two" turned into an hour of waiting. And also it seems that if you try to do anything else while downloading it pauses the download until you stop whatever your doing??
 
berkleeboy210 said:
Last night I said, hm let try a rental. So I decided on I now pronounce you chuck and larry in HD of course. Clicked rent. and I wasn't able to start watching it for an HOUR.

My Connection is fine.

I was a little disappointed that a "minute or two" turned into an hour of waiting. And also it seems that if you try to do anything else while downloading it pauses the download until you stop whatever your doing??
Click to expand...

How fast is your connection? I have a 10Mb connection and I was able to start Live Free or Die Hard in HD within 2 minutes. Also, it continues the download in the background while you are doing other things, but the download queue only downloads one at a time.
 
AliensAreFuzzy said:
How fast is your connection? I have a 10Mb connection and I was able to start Live Free or Die Hard in HD within 2 minutes. Also, it continues the download in the background while you are doing other things, but the download queue only downloads one at a time.
Click to expand...

My connection is 10MB also and I actually tried Live Free or Die Hard in HD. I could start it after a bit but it stopped sometime there after. I pretty much had to wait until it was over 50% unfortunately. With a non-HD movie it worked fine though but of course that had a smaller file size.

While I was downloading Live Free or Die Hard in HD I attempted to play some content on Apple TV and it stopped the download. I think it was because the content was streaming from my computer but that was kind of a bummer as I have the smaller Apple TV. Ah well. I was kind of disappointed with the start and stream of the HD as I have the fastest residential connection available to me. In the future I will definitely purchase the item at least 2 hours before I plan on starting it.
 
berkleeboy210 said:
Hey all,

I finally took the plunge and bought a 160gb Apple TV yesterday. Hooked it up within 5 minutes and was set to go.

I'm only using this for movies, so I began the process of syncing currently 22 HandBreak Converted :)apple:TV Preset) DVDs to the Device. No Problem. Didn't finish because I dont leave my computer on all night but it went smoothly for what I got done.

Last night I said, hm let try a rental. So I decided on I now pronounce you chuck and larry in HD of course. Clicked rent. and I wasn't able to start watching it for an HOUR.

My Connection is fine.

I was a little disappointed that a "minute or two" turned into an hour of waiting. And also it seems that if you try to do anything else while downloading it pauses the download until you stop whatever your doing??
Click to expand...

What kind of router are you using? Did you attempt to check your actual internet speed to see if maybe something was up with it? Here are some sites to do so. www.bandwitdhplace.com and www.visualware.com are 2 of my faves. Also make sure your router isn't giving you troubles. I rented Live Free or Die Hard and it was ready in 1-2 minutes and never stopped there after.
 
SilentPanda said:
My connection is 10MB
Click to expand...

No it isn't. You don't have a 10 MEGABYTE connection to your provider.

I assume you meant 10 Mbps... megabits per second. But for that matter, I have a few questions:

1. Who is your provider?

2. What modem/router did they provide you? What kind of router are you using behind that (if applicable)?

3. What is the stated bandwidth of your internet connection?

4. What is the stated bandwidth of your internal network? (your wired and wireless)

5. When you go to speedtest.speakeasy.net what speed does the network return?

6. What other processes are running over your network while attempting to rent HD from AppleTV?


The reason I ask is because I have a 15 Mbps connection. My HD rentals are watchable in 10-20 seconds, with almost no hiccups during playback. There was one brief one... but I had never isolated the problem to identify the source-- e.g. AppleTV, my network, the internet, etc. And frankly, those kind of hiccups can happen on any device, over any network, at any speed.

But if it's happening all the time, you've got a problem that needs to be isolated... and the above questions will help in that regard.

If you happen to have an AirPort Extreme router, you can use AirPort Flow utility to measure the actual throughput of your router via SNMP... There may be similar tools for other routers. Between internet speed tests and internal network speed tests, you can easily identify where the bottleneck is.
 
I have a 6-8Mb connection to Comcast, with an AEBS and an 802.11n wireless connection to my Apple TV. I rented Fantastic 4 in HD, and was able to start watching almost immediately - certainly within a minute or two. It played all the way through.

I know speed tests can be misleading - especially with Comcast's "Turbo boost" or whatever they call it, but I get speeds of 15-20Mb/s+ on my MBP over 802.11n when I check speedtest.net.

Actual downloads (say podcasts in iTunes) are routinely 4-6Mb/s. For example, I could have Diggnation, TWIT, and MacBreak weekly all three downloading at once, and at least one of them will be 4.5Mb/s when I check it as it downloads.
 
berkleeboy210 said:
I just ran a speed test via www.speedtest.net

I use Verizon DSL.

Download speed was: 2890 kb/s
Upload Speed was 703 kb/s

And I'm using an Aiport Extreme Base Station over my Wireless N Network
Click to expand...

Ok that's a tremendous difference from what you said earlier. Are you paying for 3 Mbps DSL or are you paying for 10 Mbps and getting 3? Better check on that.

I don't understand where the 10 Mbps came from... did you assume this or is that what Verizon told you?
 
The 2nd poster mentioned the line speed not the OP.

Were you syncing as well as downloading? Since you mentioned that you didn't finish syncing the night before, that might have affected the speed.

Just thinking outloud.
 
I rented Pirates At Worlds End in HD and it was slow for me too...did not watch it until the next day.

I have a 10 Mbps connection and get about that 9.5Mbps out of Chicago and Texas on SpeakEasy.net. The day that I probably rent the movie was a bad day because at times I will only get about 5Mbps and it is really jumpy.

It was disappointing at first that I could not watch the movie right away, but hey that is the name of the game when it comes to the internet, it is very unpredictable.
 
Holy crap you people have fast internet.

But if it's still glitchy, just for kicks, try resetting your router and cable/DSL modem.

I was having weird performance glitches the other day that I could not explain. iTunes downloads that used to take 10 minutes were taking upwards of 45 minutes (according to the time estimate in iTunes). Further, whenever I downloaded large files from iTunes, like TV shows or HD quality podcasts, it would completely saturate my connection to the point that I could do nothing else -- Safari web surfing started timing out, Adium booted me off MSN and ICQ because they lost connections. Pausing the iTunes download immediately allowed Safari to finish loading the page and Adium could reconnect. Weird!

I lived like this for a week, grumbling and planning to complain to my ISP that the internet was crappy again... but after I reset the router (a D-Link "N" router) and modem, all was well again.

I've learned that a bad router can make all the difference in how fast your internet speeds are.
 
I have a 10Mbps connection and this evening I rented an HD movie. It was ready to go within 2 minutes and the entire movie downloaded in about 45 minutes. I watched the whole movie without a glitch right after the initial 2 minute wait.

Having a good solid wireless router makes all the difference in the world. I went through 3 routers before I settled on the Linksys WRT-330N (this is before I got any of the Apple stuff).
 
rented 2 HD movies tonite. Both were viewable within a minute. I am using N wireless but I have a pretty fast internet connection.
 
berkleeboy210 said:
I just ran a speed test via www.speedtest.net

I use Verizon DSL.

Download speed was: 2890 kb/s
Upload Speed was 703 kb/s

And I'm using an Aiport Extreme Base Station over my Wireless N Network
Click to expand...

That's about what I have. It's over an hour to start a 90min HD movie. The bottleneck will be your ISP. It's ~4mbps for a HD movie, so anything less than that is going to need a pretty good head start.
 
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