First Bad Experience with an Apple Product

Oh yeah, I never do that anyway. Only have one ATV and never have anything else running at the same time.

Message was edited by: vazandrew

Tens of thousands? You exaggerate a million times an hour.

Instant rentals for me. I did have to upgrade from my 3MBPS DSL, however; but at that point I didn't even know what speed I was getting. I've had this product since the first inception and can tell you the new one is even more elegant than the last one. For you to create a profile with the name you chose tells me you have another agenda. You are just scolding other users here who try to help people with legitimate complaints. You bought the wrong item, you should return it and buy the product that better suits your needs, nobody here cares one way or the other what you do. For me, as a media player and a whole home music system this tool is light years ahead and far more affordable than any other option. Does Google TV even exist in the marketplace yet? Quite the comparison to make if it doesn't.

As always, do the right Consumer thing and vote with your wallet!

Brian.

wande00 wrote:
For many, ATV2 is much slower to play Netflix on than on other devices. I don't know technically why it is, but Netflix loads regular TV shows and movies WAAAY slower than from my laptop or internet capable Vizio tv. In fact, there are many TV shows that won't play at all however stream perfectly fine on my other devices.

This is definitely not normal behavior for Netflix on Apple TV. One reason I prefer using Netflix on Apple TV is that it is substantially faster than on my other 3 Netflix clients. It's especially fast loading Netflix, but certainly no slower cuing up media. I have yet to encounter anything that wouldn't play. The only significant bugs I've encountered so far is that occasionally I get an error when trying to start a show, and have to try a second time (although this hasn't happened since the update), and sometimes it doesn't show all (or any) of the thumbnails of FF and reverse.

Hello Folks.
The major problem is not the download speed. The main problem is that ATV2 does not save the movie in the memory.
Takes hours to load, even in 10mbps connection, and if anything happens wile movie is loading, it flush´s out the memory.
Anything means, watches a different preview of other movie, watches YouTube, plays some content from airplay, you lose all the download time you spent until that time, and have to start all over again.
Even if the movie is completely load, and accidentally you fast forward to the end of the movie, it´s unload from the memory and I have to wait all over again.

It will save it if you don't load the flash drive down by streaming other content, which makes sense. If you fast forward to the end it will think you have finished with it. Is that your advertised speed or based on speed test? If so, it could be throttling by ISP, or other things causing slow loading times.

I just rented Toy Story 3, five seconds after I clicked rent it said it was ready and it played straight through perfectly fine.

If you have 10mbps connection like you say you do and your Netflix streams don't start in less than 10 seconds you have a problem with your particular situation. Like the previous poster, I can watch HD movies on Netflix within 5 seconds of clicking play and I only have a 6mbps connection.

"Now you and I know this because we have a long standing working knowledge of Apple TV. But, I am going to play devils advocate here, nowhere on the Apples web site that advertises the Apple TV does it say that, not even in fine print you can barely read at the bottom does it say that. In fact here is all it does say from Apples tech specs site:
"Wi-Fi (802.11 a, b, g, or n) wireless network (wireless video streaming requires 802.11a, g or n) or 10/100BASE-T Ethernet network"

Now do I think people are over-reacting? Yes. However, I do think Apple has failed in addressing the problem and they have failed in properly educating ATV buyers. "

I agree with that statement.

When Apple TV is slow to download it is either a poor local network (b or g and not n) or it is the internet connection. This one sounds like a 1-3Mbps speed............. Apple can't control that, or fix it and maintain quality videos. The experience of having all your movie instantly available once downloaded are true. Pay for a bit more speed, or connect your ATV2 via ethernet. Don't complain to Apple about something everyone understands and has been true fo as long as I can remember. Not a fanboy..... this comment is just off base and way miss directed

I can see why Apple doesn't provide a firm number, because speed is not necessarily constant and not everybody gets the rated speed, as actual speed can vary depending upon things like how hard your neighbors have been hitting the channel. So they'd have people complaining, "My network meets the spec, but it still doesn't perform adequately."

Netflix has a nice system in that it smoothly degrades, so you'll see something even if you have a slow link. But some people would rather not watch at all than watch a degraded picture. I'm not sure if Netflix on AppleTV downgrades to adjust to network speed as it does on other devices; I don't think I've ever seen it do this, but it may not need to, because I have a reasonably fast connection. There was one occasion when Netflix on AppleTV delivered an apparently HD picture with no problems, while Netflix on PS3 delivered a SD picture.

I agree that network diagnostics could stand to be improved. There have been a number of people who ultimately figured out that their Apple TV problems were due to their firewalls, but Apple TV should be able to determine whether it is communicating properly and provide an informative error message, rather than putting people in the position of testing everything about their setup.

I'm pretty sure Netflix still degrades on ATV, I noticed a slight lapse in quality (only a few seconds) the other day, but the quality seems a lot better than anything else i've used to view their service.

A lot of finger pointing but no solutions. My first Apple HD rental on my new ATV2 said it would take 12 hours and 1 minute. I just tested my network speed on speedtest.net from San Diego to San Jose and it shows a download rate of 7.93 mbps - seems adequate to me. I've also never had any problems with my old ATV1. OK, not what should I do as an end-user? It' too late to return it. Doubt I can get my ISP to go faster. I've restarted everything more then once. Now what? Give me a real solution...

Check to see if your ISP is throttling the connection. If you let the rental download to the hard-drive and then came back later to watch on ATV1 that would make a difference.

Here are steps to your real solution :

1. How is your Apple TV connected. If it's wireless, try with ethernet and report back the results so we can interpret them.

2. Which router do you have ?

3. Give AppleCare a call

Hhmmm. I just went back to my wired network and reran the speedtest.net again. This time I'm getting over 12mbps download! What a difference from my 7.93 thru my Airport Extreme, event though I was hardwired to it from my Mac. I also tried renting an HD movie like before, this time the movie was ready almost instantly. I haven't started to watch it yet - it's late, but it looks like hardwiring helped. However, as I tried to post this message, my net connection dropped again, so my modem might be going south. Curious though why the huge difference in speed between my Airport and my old dlink router...

OK...I'm not sure I understand. First, 8 MBPS should be enough for HD streaming. Did you hardwire the Apple TV to the Airport extreme and then the movie was ready to watch instantly ? If yes, you might have an issue with your Wifi network. Interference or Wifi load are the first that are coming to my mind.

Since you have an Airport Extreme base station, try to switch the network to the 5 GHz band. You will have to reconfigure the Apple TV WiFi connection. Retry a rental and report back.