4 hour download time for HD movie

What sort of speed is your internet connection?

Standard def movies are usually about 1-2GB in size depending on movie length - even that is a lot of data to download unless you have a very fast connection.

I have a pitiful 1Mbps connection and a standar def file would take hours to download, I rented a HD movie last night to watch sometime this weekend and it said about 13hours to download (or was it to start watching?).

Internet movie delivery is the way forward but the internet speed for many people is simply not good enough to give instant on demand HD viewing. In a few years time things will be quite different.

AppleTv will also calculate how long it'll take to start watching a movie while the ned is still being downloaded - so you can start before it's all there, but if your internet speed slows it might stop.

Appreciate this is an annoyance for you, but I've resigned myself to saying what do we want to watch tomorrow then I'll start the download the night before or on my way to work. Still saves a trip to Blockbuster.

See:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1577

AC

If Apple's servers are overlaoded they could also slow delivery if you have a very fast broadband connection.

AC

Message was edited by: Alley_Cat

How long would a non-HD movie take on average?
As a "rule of thumb," an "true" HD version of a SD file of the same level of quality would contain 6-7 times as much data. Thus, assuming your data transfer rate remains constant, you might expect the SD version to download in 35-40 minutes under the same circumstances. However, since I assume your HD download is limited to 720p here, the HD:SD ratio would likely be on the order of 2.25-3.0:1 here or 80 to 105 minutes under the same circumstances. A better question here is whether or not the file is cached/downloaded in a "progressive" manner so it can be viewed while it is still being download. (Since I make all my own content rather than renting or purchasing from iTunes, I have no idea what the answer to this secondary question might be.)

Dunstan Cooke wrote:
a 4 hour download time!?

Is this typical? I have scanned other threads in the forum and seen other comments about ISP bandwidth throttling (8 pm on Friday night I guess would likely be a peak time).

I have seen a wide variety of buffering delays for HD movies, ranging from 2-3 minutes to > 2hours. In almost every case, long initial buffer times have been caused by the wireless connection between my ATV and my Apple Extreme basestation. Checking the client signal strength showed a low-signal/high-noise condition that was throttling the connection. None of my other connections are affected. Rebooting the base station instantly fixes the problem.

YMMV of course, but I would check your ATV connection before blaming your ISP or the iTunes servers for the slow response. When it's working correctly (and you have a fast ISP) you should be able to start watching your HD rental in < 5 minutes.

We faced similar issues with our new ATV a year ago or so... through this forum, people advised me to try lining up the ATV with the wifi unit connected to the computer... that helped but still didn't do things fast enough. What solved the problem for us was connecting the ATV directly into the LAN connection over the network... now that is impressive. We rent a movie by pressing a button and second later see the message confirming it is ready to watch.

We also use the ATV to slideshow our pictures and show home videos. Both of these are very much faster over the wired connection: conclusion if you can wire directly to internet that is best by far (in my experience).

Hope that can be done for you. ATV is a great product that way.

I would not say this is typical. It takes me on average 8 minutes to download enough of a HD movie to start playing it. Sometimes it is 4 minutes, sometimes 15 (hence, just enough time to get comfortable and get all the drinks and popcorn). SDs are usually instantly ready (sometimes they can take 30 seconds however). Thus, I would suspect your internet connection is slow or misconfigured. I can't say how long it actually takes to download the entire movie since I have always starting viewing them before they finish downloading. They have always been finished by the time the movie ends without any glitches during playback and I have rented well over 50 movies by now.

Jaisen

What speed connection do you have from your ISP?

AC

Dunstan Cooke wrote:

I am using a wireless connection to my Apple Airport Extreme and the signal strength seems to be very good, so I don't think this is limiting. That said, it seems that some have found improvements from a wired connection. I will try and find a spare ethernet cable at work to test this.

If you're checking signal strength at the ATV, it can be deceiving. Always use the Airport Utility and then choose Advanced=>Logs&Statistics->Wireless Clients to get the true state of things. In particular, look at the Rate column and make sure it's reading is greater than 32 or so.

I downloaded the HD version of "Appleseed Ex Machina" a couple of weeks ago from the UK store. I think the movie was about 3GB (1 hour 45 mins). It took about 4 hours to download, with the device predicting that I could start watching after 3 hours. This is on an ADSL "up to 8Mb" line that can achieve a pathetic 1.6Mb throughput when the wind is blowing in the right direction.

So your predicted time makes it look like the bottleneck isn't necessarily at your end.

be sure to purchase any movies you want to watch "soon" on the ATV not the computer, the device will buffer a portion of the downloaded movie and then allow you to begin watching it before it has finished downloading. If you purchase through iTunes on your computer you won't be watching the movie very soon, as it has to download completely and then transfer to your ATV ...