Pier Rodelon wrote:
Here's the problem: HD stuff is crazy slow to load. And when it's loaded, it doesn't stay loaded.
Movies are fixed size, they don't adapt quality to the speed of an individual connection.
If you were getting a steady 8Mbps which is probably unlikely I'd expect an HD film to be ready in a few minutes at most.
You may not be getting that 8Mbps - test with something like:
http://www.speedtest.net/
If you're getting 7-8 Mbps, then it's possible your local network is delivering a slower speed, especially if you're only seeing 1 bar.
It's also possible your ISP is throttling your connection to Apple's servers, or contention with other users at peak times is affecting things. Occasionally Apple's servers are slow.
I have a slower connection which is fixed at around 3.5Mbps - an HD movie is usually ready in 30 mins or so.
Thursday night I rented an HD movie and clicked Watch. I got the msg in the title of this post, or something very similar.
Thirty minutes later I got a message saying it was loaded and ready to watch but by that time we'd already moved on to another movie (in standard def).
The standard def movie has probably displaced the HD one from AppleTV's buffer so it has to reload.
So Friday night I clicked on the movie that had loaded the previous night, assuming it would still be loaded and ready to play.
No luck. Went back to the same msg in the title of post.
This is ridiculous, seems to me.
Can someone explain what is happening? My wireless setup is Comcast high speed (8Mps), a Motorola SBG900 cable modem and wireless router. I get a fine connection on Netflix, VUDU, etc. thru my LG BlueRay player, and through the Apple TV in SDef. The connection, tested from Apple TV always shows only 1 bar unlit.
Firstly movie size.
HD movies are often 3-4GB SD around 1-1.5GB. They're quite large.
AppleTV 1 and 2 start downloading the movie, work out the average connection speed, then calculate how long it takes to load enough of the movie to play it through with the rest downloading in the background as you watch.
A couple additional questions: when you LOAD an HD movie, what actually happens? Is there memory on the Apply TV box to store the movie?
This is one difference between AppleTV 1 and 2 - the 1st gen had a hard drive and would let you watch a movie once enough was downloaded, but once it had all downloaded it stayed until either, (if unwatched) the 30 day rental period expired, or if you'd started to watch the 24 or 48 hour view window expired (some countries get 48 hours to watch). You could also delete a movie if you wanted to.
AppleTV 2 only has 8GB of solid state memory which is presumably shared between operational tasks such as storing photos for screensavers, miscellaneous data storage and movie storage.
I had assumed before I got one that once a movie once downloaded it would stay until it expired, but a variety of things from playing music to renting another movie can flush the download from memory.
To me this is crazy - particularly for people with slower connections who wait hours to start watching, then might need to wait hours again if they do something else like browsing YouTube.
I cannot believe it is beyond the capability of the software engineers to manage the memory in such a way that a large download can remain whilst other less intensive tasks use other parts of the memory.
Clearly the memory is limited, and if say you rented another HD movie then 2 might not fit simultaneously - I think if a download is about to be flushed from the memory there should be a warning requiring confirmation to proceed (if you have a fast connection an option to disable warnings in settings would be good to cater for all).
What really surprises me is how illogical it is -if a movie has to download again both the user and Apple waste their internet bandwidth a second time. Someone used up 25GB to watch a HD movie one weeked in one of the other related fora.
Is it stored elsewhere (like on one of the computers on the network)?
No it's only on AppleTV temporarily or on Apple's servers.
Are we really expected to take 30 minutes to an hour or more to download an HD movie we want to watch?
Unless Apple's servers are playing up this is down to simple bandwidth issues locally or at your ISP.
Take a 4GB HD download.
8Mbps -> 1MB/sec -> 1024 secs for 1GB to download
-> 4096 secs for 4GB to download
-> about 68 mins
So if film was say 2 hours then it can easily download completely before you finish watching so you only need a short period of buffering.
If however you were getting 4Mbps the whole film would take 136 mins to download, so you need to download at least for 16 mins (probably a little more) or so to allow the rest to download as you watch the 2 hour film .
On a 2MB connection 272 mins so you'd need at least 152 mins downloading to be able to watch the 120 min film without interruptions.
To me your local network speed is likely the issue - if you can run an ethernet cable to AppleTV from your router to compare that might show that the wireless is the weak link. If other devices get good signal in same location it's possible you have a dodgy wi-fi card in AppleTV, but somewhat unlikely.
Some users set to Google's DNS servers have also reported issues improved by changing this setting for their internet connections.
AC