Netflix pausing/buffering issues

There could be something to what you say. Several times we'd be watching a tv episode and it just fails part way. I give up and select another TV show and it works fine.

In any case, when it works, it's fantastic and I love it. But when it fails to buffer/load it's frustrating. Most times it works great.

Hi John, you are not alone! I've (and so many others) have reported this. I too love my ATV when it works but have been frustrated with the inconsistencies. I can tell you what I did and I don't know if that fixed it or it was a combination of firmware updates on the ATV and Netflix that fixed it but It's been behaving perfectly for a few days. No strange buffering after about 40 seconds at the beginning, no stalling somewhere in the middle etc. I upgraded the firmware on the ATV and changed the DNS to google's DNS 008.008.008.008 (as someone suggested in another forum)

UPDATE

The new Apple TV software update release this week DID NOT FIX THE ISSUE.

Apple please fix the issue. I put a network sniffer on my network, the issue seems to happen when the network connection to Netflix is delayed or slowed, your Netflix software CANT NOT handle it and the buffering is not enough to handle it so it pauses to catch up.
When I say connection slowed I am not talking about my area network, it is the connection to the Netflix servers that is slowed, the network out side of my ISP.

I then did the network sniff using my Xbox 360 and Samsung Netflix Blue ray, BOTH could handle any network performance issues.

I have the top tier 25 mbps Cable modem speed. Your Apple PPV movie software does NOT have this buffering issue, thus this is something you can fix via a software update. To fix it please update the buffering setting on the Netflix app.

Apple please fix this with your next update. You now have thousands of postings saying people have this issue. You now know how to fix it.

Message was edited by: Bob200000

Bob2000000, please copy and paste this clear message to the Bug Report. I would hope that they read the Bug Reports more than they read our Discussion threads! Thanks so much for clarifying. One day maybe they'll actually read it and do something about it!

I have to say my Netflix issues have become worse this last week. A coincidence, I don't know. But now weveral times I'd try and watch netflix and get the error, Netflix is unavailable at this time, try later. I back up a menu, then down again, and sometimes get one menu or choice deeper.

But tonight I just gave up and watched a DVD. Had no cloud problems at all.

Also hight speed cable, OpenDNS...

My Apple TV paused 4 times watching an old SD TV show from Netflix.

No HD and no Dolby, it was not even full screen as it was so old. This tells me the issue is not related to movie size or resolution

My ATV us not usable

I have NO problems streaming NetFlix. All the movies and TV shows run smoothly with no interruptions. I have 6meg DSL from AT&T. It's not the fastest, but it works just fine.

virg

NetFlix recommends at least 3meg internet download speed for the best reception.

virg

Submitting similar symptoms.

Internet: 10MB down, 756k up
Internal LAN: gigabit ethernet
Firewall: Airport Base Station
Netflix clients tested: Mac, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Apple TV

Symptoms persist ONLY on AppleTV. Symptoms can be replicated in every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2. All SD streams. If anybody is looking for an accurate way to replicate the symptoms to find a solution, there you go.

My setup: FTTH with 50/1 Mbps, wired to downstairs Airport Extreme, wired to upstairs Airport Express, and 802.11n to aTV2.

Netflix buffered constantly and rentals took forever. Speed tests on the upstairs wifi were 6Mbps down, 1 up. Poor numbers, but more than plenty to allow Netflix on iPad, Xbox, and Macbook to work flawlessly on same SSID as the aTV. Packet captures showed nothing interesting, yet Netflix/rentals + aTV2 was totally unusable.

Decided last week to upgrade house wiring to cat6, which boosted upstairs throughput to 30Mbps ... and now everything works like a charm!

I get the feeling that the aTV is insanely sensitive to jitter. It might be able to deal with low bandwidths, but it didn't work over crappy wiring despite throughput tests in the 6-8 Mbps range.

Hope this helps someone ... jlr

Ryan Sturt wrote:
Submitting similar symptoms.

Internet: 10MB down, 756k up
Internal LAN: gigabit ethernet
Firewall: Airport Base Station
Netflix clients tested: Mac, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Apple TV

Symptoms persist ONLY on AppleTV. Symptoms can be replicated in every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2. All SD streams. If anybody is looking for an accurate way to replicate the symptoms to find a solution, there you go.

Last night, I played an episode of Buffy Season 2. It played through completely with zero pauses, just like every other Netflix show that I've played on Apple TV. I continue to suspect that the problem is likely at Netflix's end, and may be related to different devices accessing different servers depending upon where in the country they are located.

This weekend, an interesting thing happened. For the first time ever, the quality of the stream was degraded prior to stalling. I suspect something has changed. It actually seemed to degrade rather than stall in many cases, so it was easier to watch overall. I agree this is likely on the Netflix side because it only seems to happen during high traffic times.

Hopefully this means they're working on it. It's a shame this forum isn't on the Netflix site.

On their tech blog, Netflix points out that some devices are more "chatty" than others.

"One of our device implementations accounts for about 50% of the total API calls," writes Jacobson. "That same device, however, is responsible for significantly less streaming traffic."

This fits with comments throughout this thread, from people who have problems via AppleTV but not other devices (PS3, Roku) on the same network.

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/02/redesigning-netflix-api.html

Manually setting the DNS to my ISP's DNS server did not work btw. I still get buffering.

Prior to my Apple TV 2 I was accessing Netflix with a Roku HD. There would be times, usually during peak traffic hours, that the Roku would rebuffer to a lower quality video stream; sometimes very low quality. By doing so, the movie wouldn't freeze.

When I moved to the Apple TV, I started noticing freezing issues within a few hours. This was very annoying. I tried both wireless and wired connections with no change. I attempted to change DNS servers; nothing. I tried updating firmware; even hacking the box; again, nothing. I figured that my 7mbps DSL service was plenty to stream a movie without any issues, but my DSL provider informed me that they could upgrade me to 12mbps service for only a few dollars extra and I'd get a new modem with 802.11N to boot.

The modem showed up last Friday night. Even though the DSL upgrade wasn't scheduled to go into affect until Saturday morning, I decided to set up the new modem. I didn't run into any freezing issues on Friday night. Saturday after being upgraded, I also ran into no freezing issues. It wasn't until Sunday night that a movie started to freeze up every 3-4 minutes. I ran a couple DSL speed tests and they all showed between 10.9 and 11.5mbps download speeds. Later that evening, I started the same movie over and did not run into one freezing issue.

Even though the Apple TV freezes on occasion, I have never seen it rebuffer to a lower video quality stream; it always serves a very crisp image. It is my guess that this freezing is related to the load put on certain Netflix servers during high traffic viewing times and the Apple TV's stubbornness to serve a high-quality video stream. My thoughts are that if Apple tweaked the Apple TV to rebuffer lower-quality stream, we would not see this freezing issue, but would instead be served steady, lower-quality streams.