How long does it take to load a movie

Saxfour

Purchased or rented direct from iTunes? It depends on your speed. I watched HD Anna Karenina this week and it was ready before I had made a coffee. I have had no problems (I have a 8 meg service getting about 4 in the router used by ATV.) As a rough rule a SD movie needs 2 Mbps, 720 needs 4Mbps and 1080 needs 6 Mbps if the guidelines are read.

It depends on the speed of your connection and the size of the movie. I have a 20Mbps ADSL2+ line and most movies load in a few minutes. Never more than 5 minutes.

julesnewtoMac wrote:

Saxfour

Purchased or rented direct from iTunes? It depends on your speed. I watched HD Anna Karenina this week and it was ready before I had made a coffee. I have had no problems (I have a 8 meg service getting about 4 in the router used by ATV.) As a rough rule a SD movie needs 2 Mbps, 720 needs 4Mbps and 1080 needs 6 Mbps if the guidelines are read.

Just to clarify:

SD 2.5 Mbps

720p 6 Mbps

1080p 8 Mbps

....are the recommended rates for 'near instant playback'.

AC

Chamar wrote:

It depends on the speed of your connection and the size of the movie. I have a 20Mbps ADSL2+ line and most movies load in a few minutes. Never more than 5 minutes.

Presumably your service is not delivering 20 Mbps but 'up to 20 Mbps' as with that speed even 1080p shouldplay virtually instantly.

I'm sure they play quicker for you than me as I'm currently only getting 4.5 Mbps or so. May have fibre available soon.

Thanks A_C!

julesnewtoMac wrote:

Thanks A_C!

The figures tend to be 'worst case', and yes even on 4.5 Mbps or so some 1080p HD will start in a few mins, but I'm renting less these days.

If Apple aren't encoding at around 8 Mbps for 1080p you might wonder if they're not optimising for that rate, but many movies may get away with lower rates/more compression I suspect.

I've always been fairly happy with Netflix's rate adaptive streaming - it makes the wait for rentals seem a bit tedious, and a shame Apple coudln't offer something similar to enable if you had a very slow connection.

AC

If you are lucky the above figures are accurate. If you read other posts in this forum, the vast majority of people cannot rent and watch a movie wirelessly at all. The Apple TV takes far too long to load a movie if it works at all. Be ready to work with customer service in getting a credit if you try to rent a movie. Other services i.e. VUDU and CinemaNow work much better.

Bblake