Q: Netflix quality HORRID after update

I think that what neilka says about routing issues, maybe related to the rollout of "Super HD," makes the most sense as an explanation as to why the problem has gone away for some people but not others, especially considering the fact that those still having problems seem to be concentrated in certain geographic areas. I am one of the lucky ones whose problem suddenly disappeared a couple of weeks ago and has not returned, and I did nothing to make that happen. I am in Pennsylvania and using Comcast.

I wish that Netflix would make some public statement about this problem and end all the speculation. Their silence does nothing for their credibility.

Netflix can publish an overall upgrade schedule. ISPs can also provide a similar customer-facing schedule (like the Wireless companies do for their RAN/Backhaul). It would reduce speculation and guesswork for customers.

Many SPs provide a customer-facing status-of-service-in-your-area information regularly.

Netflix on the Apple TV seems to be working again for me. I'm getting a constant 5800 Kbps stream. Can anyone else in the Miami Florida area confirm this?

Just tried it here in L.A.   I'm on a 50mb/s cable modem connection... actually got 1920x1080 resolution for about 8 seconds, then it paused and dropped me down to 320x200-something.  At the beginning the stream was 4800kbps but at the drop it went down to practically nothing. Still not working here, unfortunately.

Kirby

Just a data point, watched quite a bit of Netflix yesterday and while it was uniformly good throughout the day, during the hours of 7pm and 9pm Pacific I saw a few instances where quality dropped to the lowest possible level for a few seconds, but then it went back to at least DVD quality and most of the time to HD if not SuperHD (all based on observations, not on the Netflix example short.)

In fairness I am ok with that. Of course I'd love Blu-ray quality 100% of the time but a few seconds of congestion now and again isn't so bad. This does bring up the question of how Netflix thinks they will be able to deliver 4K quality with any regularity. My suspicion is they won't, not for another year or two.

And I watched a few episodes of Arrow on Netflix (ATV) yesterday, including during dinner, and then my wife and I watched two episodes of Breaking Bad (Netflix ATV) starting at 7 PM yesterday, all was at full HD with no drop in quality. Perhaps the difference between myself and Middle is in ISP or their routing. Just a few very short drops in quality could be a brief system load anywhere along the route resulting in a shift of routing or a quick bog-down for the same reason.  I am a computer tech at a small software company, software and hardware ... but networking unfortunately for this thread itself is not my expertise.

Just adding fuel to the fire as I finally used and tested the beautiful piece of cinema, "Example 23.976." Streaming at the very poor rate of 320 kpbs while my iPhone was able to stream at nearly 10 times that. TWC 15mb download in NC. Like others, this has been happening since the November update.

2 Roku's, iPad, 4 iPhone's, Wii, Blu-ray player, and 2 Kindle Fire's stream perfectly on the same network.

For posters having quality issues with Netflix, do other streaming services (like Amazon Prime, PBS, ESPN, HBOGo, Hulu(Plus) etc.) from the same device work satisfactorily?

lindelof wrote:

 

Just adding fuel to the fire as I finally used and tested the beautiful piece of cinema, "Example 23.976." Streaming at the very poor rate of 320 kpbs while my iPhone was able to stream at nearly 10 times that. TWC 15mb download in NC. Like others, this has been happening since the November update.

 

2 Roku's, iPad, 4 iPhone's, Wii, Blu-ray player, and 2 Kindle Fire's stream perfectly on the same network.

4s and 5s behave differently. as do various iPad generations.

Everything else on my Apple TV 3 works great: HBO Go, Vimeo, PBS, etc.  Gorgeous streaming quality. Netflix is the lone culprit.

Kirby

In my case, yes, every other app I use on the ATV streams fine, with the exception of whatever the Yahoo! app is called, but I can live with that. I rented Gone with the Wind in HD this past week from iTunes, which is 4 hours long and should have been a real test of bandwidth capabilities on my wifi netwok and my ATV. It streamed wonderfully with no glitches, pausing, or noticable bitrate changes.

As for the iOS devices I mentioned, they all stream Netflix perfectly and aren't exactly new.

iPhone 3gs

iPhone 4

iPhone 4s x2

iPad Mini (first gen)

Loner T wrote:

 

For posters having quality issues with Netflix, do other streaming services (like Amazon Prime, PBS, ESPN, HBOGo, Hulu(Plus) etc.) from the same device work satisfactorily?

As noted multiple times in this thread yes.  This thread is nominally, per the OP,  about a recent Netflix client specific problem.

Downloads from the iTunes store should be a good benchmark.  In my case they immediately jump to my maximum speed (30Mb) and stay at that rate until the download completes.  It's too bad other services don't provide test videos.

When I was experiencing the issue with Netflix on my ATV, YES, everything else was working flawlessly. In fact, AT&T U-Verse itself has pretty lousy HD TV service, too much compression resulting in the HD picture being usually sub-par and making rental movies worthless. So we have used the ATV for movie rentals from iTunes  when we didn't want to run out to the nearest Redbox, and we get perfect Blueray quality every time.

bodosom wrote:

 

Loner T wrote:

 

For posters having quality issues with Netflix, do other streaming services (like Amazon Prime, PBS, ESPN, HBOGo, Hulu(Plus) etc.) from the same device work satisfactorily?

As noted multiple times in this thread yes.  This thread is nominally, per the OP,  about a recent Netflix client specific problem.

This is a sledgehammer approach, but running a tcpdump/wireshark capture and analysing the Netflix clients and sources from which lower quality is delivered, could be one step towards notifying Apple/Netflix where in the path there could be potential issues. I will try it and post my results here for comparison purposes. Network congestion is one possible factor where the client (ATVs) and servers (Netflix) may negotiate to degrade the quality.

Has anyone tried pinging their Apple TV from a computer (while watching Netflix) to see if the Apple TV drops out? What about downgrading the Apple TV to 6.0.1 or 6.0.0 via iTunes? If I could get a hold of the old software, I'd try that.

Loner T wrote:

... one step towards notifying Apple/Netflix where in the path there could be potential issues. I will try it and post my results here for comparison purposes.

Sure, but I think enough work has already been done and the results are quite clear -- the ATV3 client only likes Limelight and Level3.  Blocking nflxvideo worked for a short while but then the clients started failing.

Don't forget that for people with this problem:

1. All other ATV streaming is fine.
2. All other (non-ATV) clients are fine.

If that's not the case it's a different problem.