Poor Picture Quality on Netflix via Apple TV (especially "HD") . . .

I have 2MB connection

PS3 Play in High HD

Applet TV - Play in Poor Quality

Now I stop using ATV3

I have exactly the same problem as described by several above.

Using the HDMI output of the Macbook Retina straight into the TV, the picture from Netflix is very nice.

I then decided to get the Apple TV to avoid having to move the computer and the picture has become absolutely awful. Ethernet of wifi, no difference. Everything else being equal, it can only come from the Apple TV or the way Netflix interacts with it.

I'll be returning it, I'm super disappointed. Of course, I only discovered this thread AFTER ordering, even though I'd checked...

In my case, what was causing the poor picture quality was the DNS I was using on my Apple TV. I manually chenged it so I could have acess to Netflix US because of geographical restrictions. The problem is that it influences badly on your connection, because you end up acessing servers that are very far from you. Since I changed it back to the DNS provided by my ISP, the picture quality got really better - but as winston said above, it isn't comparable to iTunes HD material.

Another issue I have experienced that badly influenced my speed connection and the picture quality I was getting from Netflix was my ISP service. I have a 20 Mbits connection. Despite that, I couldn't watch a single movie or tv show without hicups and buffering times...I got to the bottom of this and found out that the node of my area was saturated/over-subscribed. That is, while it had a capacity for only 27 Mbits, I, a single user, took 20 of them. The result was a very unstable connection that oscillated a lot from 4 Mbits to occasional bursts of 15 Mbits. It took them 2 visits to acknowledge the problem. Until then, I was like crazy trying to figure out what the cause of the problem was. Traffic shaping, data plan caps etc crossed my mind, but it turns out was an infrastructure problem. And the frightening truth surrounding this is that ISP's do this a lot, over-subscribe users in the same node. What this means is that if you are in a heavily loaded node, and everyone is downloading files, your speed connection will slow down.

You can find more about it here, just look for Now for the CMTS & Node:

http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/130/24/

Thanks man.

The weird thing is that I'm using the exact same DNS from my Macbook (I also had to change it manually in order to access Netflix from Europe). Yet with the Apple TV the picture quality is crap, with the Macbook it's very nice. It's all very mysterious...

I had the same issue! This problem you are experiencing was in fact the reason I first posted on this thread. I changed the DNS on my Apple TV and all the other devices I used to stream Netflix (iMac and PS3). The picture deterioration was more noticeable on the Apple TV. While I could get HD on the iMac and the PS3, it wasn't true for the Apple TV. Then I realized that the service I was using, which provided me the DNS to acess Netflix overseas, asked the users to use their secondary DNS on the Apple TV, while the PC/Mac and PS3 configuration used their primary and a secondary DNS. I figured I should use their primary DNS on the Apple TV too, not their secondary. The result was that I ended receiving the same picture quality in all the devices, that is, Low HD to Mid HD quality. These services have some limitations as to the amount of traffic that goes through their servers. It is all very difficult to be sure of anything, because all you are doing is adding a second layer of variables in the process when you use this kind of service, but I wouldn't be surprised if they limited the amount of traffic that goes to the devices under your IP. I'm saying this because at first I used only my iMac to stream and received high HD, then, when I added PS3 and Apple TV, and did the aforementioned use of their primary DNS on the Apple TV, I ended up receiving the same picture quality in all the devices (Mid HD/Low HD), but never again I received High HD. Another issue was trying to watch movies from iTunes using their DNS. The streaming speed became awful, 10 times worse than using my ISP own DNS. I had to change it back everytime I wanted to rent a movie. Ultimately, that lead me to cancel the service and resign myself to the poor catalog I get from Netflix here in my country. And that is because picture quality is a major concern to me, apparently more important than a huge catalog. Since I changed the DNS back to the original one provided by my ISP everything went back to normal. I even ditched my PS3 and now can't really say what is the picture quality I am receiving in the aforementioned scale of PQ, but it definitely is Mid HD to High HD. Hope you can make it work...

Thanks for the tip. I tried using the other DNS, to no avail. Picture quality remains crap. iTunes works fine but I don't get their business model, I could get a physical DVD for the price of their rentals and three DVD for the price of a purchase, so I have to get Netflix.

As I live in France I have no choice but to use a VPN, although a fast one that doesn't encrypt. It's very strange that it should work fine on the computer (mid HD to high HD as you put it) but so poorly on the Apple TV.

Pity, I really liked this little thing. I think the future holds great promises but they are not fully developped yet.

Went to netflix.com and logged in, changed streaming speed, working so far:

Picture quality still low after changing playback setting to High on netflix.com. I guess I will keep my xbox 360 for Netflix streaming.

I Suffer from pour out of focus picture quality on netflix on the apple series 3 TVs. But when playing Stan the picture is perfect. So it must be a Netflix concern as streaming speed is 95 MPs alway