Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming 207
rsk writes "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis."
Hrm. (Score:4, Informative)
I dunno. I used it tonight and the speeds were fine even when fast fowarding through slow parts of my selected movie.
I'll try later tonight. The streaming is the only reason I use netflix. I haven't actually returned the one DVD I have in the last few months.
Re:Hrm. (Score:5, Funny)
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I wonder if the key is 'per stream'. Is this user trying to run multiple streams off the same account.
Use Watch Instantly daily, no probs w/ Verizon DSL (Score:4, Insightful)
I use the Watch Instantly all the time as I do not have cable and have no problems. I'd check with my ISP before blaming Netflix.
OP: Are you doing any P2P stuff with your connection? I think you better check all your activity before you go blaming Netflix.
Clearwire (Score:3, Funny)
It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users down to an unusable cap â" in my case, 48 kbps
That's about the cumulative bandwidth Clearwire gives me on some days.
(on the PC)
They must have partnered with Apple.
Makes sense to me. (Score:5, Funny)
Netflix. Silverlight. And a series of tubes.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
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It is the carrier's job to provide more tubes, larger tubes, better tubes etc.. If they don't do a good job they need to get out of the industry.
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It's like water pressure when everyone watching the hockey finals goes to the bathroom during a commercial and they all flush and the pressure drops. But there's so many hocke
Happened to me as well. (Score:2, Funny)
maybe they only have so much bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)
were you watching during a high peak time? maybe they need to invest in more bandwidth.
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Oh well, back to TPB!
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Note: Tunebite looks a little too, ahem, legit for that anyway
Re:maybe they only have so much bandwidth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not Netflix fault. (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot should actually do a little fact checking before posting stories such as this. I have the Netflix service and it works perfectly, the problem here is the user's internet connection or internal network. The testing he utilized tripped of a DDOS on the Limelight network content delivery service.
Netflix doesn't even deliver the streams to individual users, so if this were an actual problem Limelight would be the one to go after, not netflix. Again, there is nothing wrong with netflix, the problem is behind the keyboard.
Re:Not Netflix fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I watched 4 hours of Netflix last night without a hitch. Granted it was really late at night, but it was just like watching normal TV.
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"Throttling this luser's stream to 48Kbps, mwuahahahaha!"
THEN, that'd be something worth reporting
On a side note, my data center's main bandwidth is provided by Limelight Networks. Some offsite backups are sent to a separate
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Faulty reasoning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we have confirmed that Netflix is throttling instant streaming PC-users to a rediculous 50 or 60 KB/sec cap
That's an interesting argument. He showed that each thread was throttled to 50 or 60 KB/sec, but he never had any evidence to support his argument atht it's netflix at fault, not his ISP or some other internet issue.
Re:Faulty reasoning? (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw this, and was curious. According to the article, he found another user on the same ISP as him, who complained about the same problem.
My guess would be, the users provider (not Netflix or their streaming provider) has noted substantial traffic on a particular port, from particular IP's, and since that was a substantial load on their network, they've throttled the per-connection rate down.
Since other users have noted that they are not having the same problem, I would conclude that it is the users provider that is the problem.
It's still something to complain about, they just need to direct the complaint to the correct party.
Years ago, when I was a RoadRunner (now BrightHouse) customer, I had speeds in excess of 3Mb/s. At the time, they were using the same Tier1 provider as my office AND had a peering very very close by (same city). They started throttling various things, including port 80. I complained, and they said they could only provide 768Kb/s (again, this is years ago).
One day, I set up a PPP over SSH tunnel between my home computer, and my desktop at work. Transferring large binary files from my office network to my home computer was much closer to the original 3Mb/s speeds. Shutting down the link and acting like a normal user, my speeds were at 768Kb/s. They wouldn't admit to the throtting of port 80 from my office network, but I had conclusively proved it.
I set up my home firewall (Linux PC, my own rules) to route all of my traffic over the PPP over SSH tunnel, so I was happy. It theoretically incurred a little extra network traffic on my office line, but we were billed on 95th percentile (as most Tier 1 providers do), and when I was at home was our slow time, and a T3, so my 3Mb/s peak was nothing in the grand scheme of things. More importantly, most of my large transfers were from home to work and back.
Providers can set up for just about anything they'd like. They shouldn't. They get a lot of people screaming when they do too much, but for the most part it's just something you live with. Maybe they're throttling everything going to/from the Netflix servers. Maybe they're only throttling port 80 traffic. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There are lots of things they could be doing.
All other things being equal, if you scp a file, or request it by HTTP, it should get very close to the same speeds.
As I've found, it's usually the residential/small business providers who do this kind of throttling. I've never seen this kind of thing with Tier 1 providers. Unfortunately, none of us can afford a fast link with a Tier 1 provider at home, so we have to bend to the will of our residential providers. I was lucky once a long time ago, in another city, at another office. I was close enough (1/2 mile) and had a clear line of sight to work. I set up a wireless bridge between the office and my house. I had 11Mb/s (years ago also, and standard for the time) link from the office to my house. They had just a T1 loop to our datacenter. After hours, when no one was working (like, after 5pm) I had my own T1 to use. I could do great transfers to the office, and was pleased with my anonymity. I was rather removed from where the line seemed to terminate (the datacenter). It wasn't completely anonymous though. We had documented internally what IP's were assigned to my house (1 for my NAT), so if there ever was any funny business, it would have landed with me. But, what if a subpoena was served on the provider to find the user of the IP? It could have been at the datacenter. It could have been at the office. It could have been off of that funny little antenna sitting in the window of a coworker (with the best line of sight to my house).
Oh, the good ol' days. I wish I had my own private T1 still. It was so much nicer than any of the residential lines I've had, even though they advertise faster speeds.
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They were blocking WHAT? {sigh}
I had always moved SSH to another port anyways, just to make it that much harder on the script kiddies, but still, what were they thinking?
I'm lucky now. I'm on a 20Mb/20Mb Business FIOS line, so no complaints there. I ran through everything with them before we agreed to it. "Look, we're migrating a small server farm, I have to have no blocked ports, no throttling, reverse DNS, and at least a /25 block". And that's what we got.
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I had always moved SSH to another port anyways, just to make it that much harder on the script kiddies, but still, what were they thinking?
They were thinking, "We're being proactive".
As always, security is more theater than actually securing stuff.
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Tell me what country you live in AC, and I will explain how our VAST landmass is actually harder, more expensive to wire. The biggest factor in U.S. broadband adoption and policy is geography, period
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Compare that to Russia, where they can connect up EVERY computer to high speed internet.
All three of them.
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Huh? :-)
A "T1" connection is quite slow by todays standards, capping out at around 1.5Mbps.
So first of all you never had any 11 Mbps through it, and secondly you never would want one today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signal_1 [wikipedia.org]
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He didn't claim to have 11Mbps through a T1, he claimed (quite believably) to have an 11Mbps wireless connection to his office which, in turn, had a T1 connection to the rest of the net.
While a T1 is 1.5Mbps maximum, he is saying that since that's a fully committed rate (not oversubscribed) and doesn't come with dirty tricks like forged RST packets and such like the residential providers employ, he gets more real performance from the actual 1.5Mbps of a T1 than from the marketing 6Mbps offered by a resident
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First off, this was years ago.
Second, I had 11Mb/s to the office, which was over my wireless link. Two high gain antennas pointed at each other from 1/2 mile. Our theoretically range with those antennas and the hardware backing it up was about 30 miles. Since they were a rather narrow beam, I couldn't even hear the signal from ground level, so there were no snoopy people problems.
My speed to the datacenter was 1.544Mb/s, but most of my large transfers were fro
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I don't know about using Amazon's network.
I do agree, VPN's can help things. It's more trouble than most people are willing to put up with. And ya, providers can traffic shape on anything they'd like. If they see encrypted traffic, regardless of the port, it could be throttled, to allow higher priority to "good" traffic like web.
Some providers do traffic shaping right, but my opinion of right won't always agree with theirs. I've logged into servers over SSH,
What happened: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What happened: (Score:5, Funny)
Why not 640kbps? After all, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
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Re:What happened: (Score:4, Funny)
So.... Cancel? (Score:2)
bad conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
I read this article, and it seems to me this guy came to a conclusion before he came to an experiment.
What he DID prove is that a Netflix server in LA was only handing out 50KB/sec per http socket. Most web type servers will do this when under heavy load- better to give everybody a little bit than a few people a lot and the others nothing. I think this is correct behavior for a heavy-load situation.
However, when he accuses them of throttling, along with the way this article is titled, STRONGLY implies that they are throttling specific users who use too much. If he wanted to prove this the test is simple- log out of netflix and log in with a friend's account, preferably a friend who doesn't stream much.
Throttling also implies that Netflix is intentionally reducing the connection quality. I see no logical reason for them to do this to EVERYbody, as that would make the Instant Watch service useless for everybody. Far more likely, as stated above, is that he's on an overloaded server.
So my take on it is this article is incompletely researched, draws a bad conclusion (which doesn't make much sense) from too little evidence, and doesn't perform the one test needed to actually verify it's claim.
Re:bad conclusions (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed, I thought the same. The most telling was using low-latency as an indication that he should be seeing high bandwidth. Not necessarily the case.
-Bill
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And don't forget the fact that they went to unlimited views because only a small number of people were using the feature at all. It would be somewhat understandable if the feature was more widely used and they had a much larger selection available via instant view.
But that being said, I just started playing a movie and there's no slow down compared to usual. Definitely better than last time, but only by the amount of bandwidth added to my own connection. Definitely not anything to support the idea of a cap.
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This is interesting to me, as I also live in the LA area, and have TERRIBLE performance the last few weeks (or months) on Netflix streaming. It used to be great (esp before it went on Xbox Live).
And I only use it 1-2 times per week at most, as usually it ends in extreme frustration with constant rebuffering at a very low bitrate.
I'm actually ready to cancel my acct with them, I only kept it as the streaming became so useful to me, and it's not any more.
OP needs to get his speed convertion right... (Score:5, Interesting)
In his blog lambasting Neftlix, he says:
"Bringing up the Status window I noticed my download performance was a far cry from my 7 mbps speed, but rather a measly 0.48 mbps, about 1/14th the speed of my line"
In the article summary above, he's now saying 48 kbps.
0.48mbps is actually 480kbps, so he's off by a factor of 10, which (while still pretty crappy) makes it sound much worse than it actually is. So which one is it, OP?
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48 kbps == 480 kbps
-Verizon
48 kbps? (Score:3, Informative)
Your ISP is the more likely culprit... (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is any throttling going on, it is more likely that your ISP is responsible for it. Cable companies and DSL providers who are getting into the video on demand business may not like Netflix beating them to market with a more cost effective product...
FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you should go back to reading books and not use
Yes I do feel 2 posts in 8 hrs is excessive. And yes I fully expect your "friends" to mod me down.
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I turned off kdawson stories for awhile, then I realized how boring slashdot was without the tinfoil hat bullshit and turned them back on. I'm expecting Bat Boy to become an editor soon.
The lunatics are running the (Slashdot) asylum (Score:5, Insightful)
Netflix streaming seems to work just fine to my PC - I just tried it. It works fine to my Tivo as well. On occasion, there are problems - but as a reasonably intelligent adult, my first assumption isn't that Netflix is causing these problems intentionally. And you know what? If I go back and try again later, things usually have sorted themselves out!
I have to wonder about the average age and/or maturity level of some Slashdot submitters, as well as the editors approving these "stories"...
Re:The lunatics are running the (Slashdot) asylum (Score:5, Interesting)
I had to scroll up to test a hypothesis. Yep. kdawson again.
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Pure FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, is Slashdot making a news article out of every morons malware induced performance issues? I watch Netflix Instant View DAILY (love the Kojak, baby) and have NEVER had issues with bandwidth limiting in the last few weeks or ever for that matter. After I read the headline, I fired up Stargate Continuum on my PC (highest quality stream, according to the service menu) and my Xbox 360 (IN HD NO LESS) and it popped up instantly with no quality issues and no delay. Next time, try contacting your crappy ISP before you waste our time with your sky-is-falling BS.
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But yeah, this BS 'article' needs to be updated with an apology for being so dumb.
A tale of an experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my neighbors is a netflix subscriber. His work is such that he HAS to have access to the internet all the time. So he has both DSL and Cable through a router that allows him to use both. This router allows him to direct traffic through one ISP or the other. When he directs netflix through the cable connection, the video stream stutters and skips. When he directs it through the DSL connection, the problems disappear. This is despite the fact that the cable connection has a nominal bitrate that is much higher.
The conclusion that he came to is that his cable provider is messing with netflix because it is competition for their own on-demand service.
I think something similar may be happening here.
This makes a lot more sense than the notion that netflix would drive away customers by providing a broken service.
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Your conclusion is wrong here, unfortunately.
There may be a "friend was able to get a $NKBps sustained transfer through the cable connection at the time of the experiment" part that we're missing from the description. Don't be so quick to jump on the "cable is shared so all of your neighbors always affect yer line's performance" bandwagon. Sometimes it really *is* a conspiracy. :)
This normal congestion behavior (Score:2)
http://formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/170/Default.aspx [formortals.com]
That guy is incompetent (Score:5, Interesting)
With an average of a 50ms response time, Iâ(TM)m going to go ahead and say my 7 mbps Qwest DSL service is working as advertised,
Most likely his provider blows.
TFA: throttled to 480Kbps(50K/s) NOT 48kbps(5K/s) (Score:2)
He WAS throttled to 480Kbps, and was getting download speeds of about 50K (that's kiloBYTES) per second (per connection).
TFA:"Bringing up the Status window I noticed my download performance was a far cry from my 7 mbps speed, but rather a measly 0.48 mbps...:"
0.48Mbps = 480Kbps (kiloBITS/sec) = roughly about 48KBps (kiloBYTES/sec)
So the /. story summary makes things sound an order of magnitude worse than they are. But you know, what's
Change ISPs (Score:2)
This is ridiculous. I know plenty of people, myself included, who have no trouble streaming Netflix. I stream to a Mac connected to our home theater with almost no buffering.
It's obviously this guy's connection, and the obvious solution is to change ISPs. There doesn't have to be some conspiracy to throttle throughput. It could simply be congestion. Performance where I live is always better at off peak times.
I would tend to agree. (Score:2)
netflix has been throttling back lately. Especially on my 360, HD content always starts out as HD and then stops because the buffer runs out. My comcast cable is setup to burst the first x number of MB in any download or stream. So, I get 40-60Mbps for the first 20-30MB of the stream or download, and then it's down to 6Mbps. Netflix sees this as my internet connection slowing and turns down the bitrate dramatically. PC streaming was generally lower res than the 360 though.
I also discovered that the bit
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Unless you have a Docsis 3.0 modem, it is physically impossible for you to get 40-60Mbps. The calculation code is wrong somewhere.
Docsis 2.0 (North American annex-B) uses a single 6Mhz channel, with the highest available encoding being QAM-256 (8 bits per sample). The standardized sample rate is 5.36Msps, so *=8 gives the true peak throughput of 42.88 Mbps, of which ~38Mbps is usable data.
I see the same thing when starting a batch download with DownThemAll, which reports 6+ MBps regularly when startin
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I'm not saying that it's accurate, I'm just saying what my system tells me.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/430414855.png [speedtest.net]
I just ran that while replying.
I should also say that my cable runs over fiber until it gets to the neighborhood.
I don't have a docsis 3.0 modem and my service isn't docsis 3.0
comcast's sandvine tactics are fudging the numbers somewhere.
It's a vast idiot conspiracy. (Score:2)
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And ponies--don't forget the ponies. Although, as we all know, they are in low abundance around the interwebs.
-dZ.
Call support (Score:2)
I'd call/email Netflix. Their customer/technical support has been excellent every time I've used it, which is a shocking rarity these days (especially if you have to deal with Verizon and their ilk on a regular basis).
Netflix are one of those weird companies that still seem to give a damn about their customers. It's one of the things that keeps me a subscriber.
Nope its just you (Score:2)
if you are experiencing those kind of buffering times you must be using the crappy old player. Try upgrading to the new player.
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And you're surprised? (Score:2)
Welcome to str..e...a.m.inn.g v.....id..e..o
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Re:Time to cancel Netflix if true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Throttling streaming video is so nonsensical that my personal suspicion is PEBCAK or an ID10T error.
Re:Time to cancel Netflix if true. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Time to cancel Netflix if true. (Score:4, Insightful)
might just be his ISP throttling him if he streams a lot or is a heavy user or if theyre generally craptastic.
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Not trolling... why is throttling streaming video nonsensical?
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It diminishes quality to the point it is unusable, so it might as well be turned off.
Re:Time to cancel Netflix if true. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
Any time we have trouble it usually is associated with our provider Comcast, not Netflix. However, with some of the streams from Netfilx the audio is out of sync or the picture quality isn't as good as it should be.
We use the HD Tivo and at times I feel almost guilty for all I get from Netflix, with the 2 at a time unlimited, my actual dvd cost has been about $.95 per dvd (4 dvds a week) and I watch more instant shows than I do from Comcast. I cut back to 1 at a time starting next month, we just can not keep watching 4 rentals a week with the weather getting nicer. Netflix makes it easy to switch between the various plans.
Netflix cured me of downloading movies, I don't get the latest screeners these days but do get anything Netflix has, and they do carry a large selection of classics that you can't find with bittorrent - the best part is there are no upload ratios and I don't have to worry about getting to 90% and having all the seeders bail out. Some rentals you need to wait in line, but if you keep plenty in your queue, the rentals will arrive on a regular basis.
I do keep seeding Ubuntu & Kubuntu, bittorent is still great for linux . There will always be people that will want everything for free, but so far Netflix has done more to curb illegal downloading than any other effort. More companies should follow the Netflix lead, rather than play the silly lawsuit game. On the other hand, Rhapsody was not a worthwhile cost for us, in theory it sounded great but, for us the reliability just was not there, after several months we dropped that subscription - they might have improved it since that time.
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Agreed.
I had issues w/Netflix and found them ALL related to Comcast. Adding a ~7 Mbps connection from AT&T solved all of my Netflix issues. Not surprisingly, Comcast would also screw up my T-Mobile UMA (IP based) cell phones and my non-Comcast IP phones at the same time.
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For me, Netflix makes it as easy or maybe easier to consume media than piracy does, and the price is low enough that it's worth it. This is the perfect example of "the way forward" for media cartels - you will not beat piracy
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Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
And that justifies downloading the movies? If you're going to do that, then do it, don't act as if netflix committing one sin is justification. I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it. Pointing to things netflix is doing wrong and saying "that's why I'm doing this" is just rationalization.
Re:Time to cancel Netflix if true. (Score:5, Interesting)
> We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
The fact that there is a nonzero number of users for Netflix's streaming service proves that's not true. Yeah, I could get everything off Bittorrent, but instead I'm an outspoken enthusiast for Netflix's instant streaming. Why would I, when it's cheaper and easier to just grab the torrent?
Because not everyone who downloads is the {MP,RI}AA caricature you seem to have bought into. We very much _want_ to "go legit", and we're waiting on the much-vaunted free market to deliver a solution that isn't 3 orders of magnitude more stressful to deal with than the Bittorrent method.
As a further example; since Amazon started selling non-DRM'd MP3 files that could be accessed from a Linux browser, I haven't gotten a single song that was available from them through any other channel, and every song that I've listened to from my pre-existing collection, I've gone back and purchased from them.
(Some) people want, very much, to support a legitimate online content delivery mechanism. We're still waiting on the free market to come up with one that isn't awful.
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What wretched idealistic bull... Is "righteous entitlement" nihilistic speak for "paying fair money for a product?"
Some people don't value their money? Remaining within the legal boundaries?
Not everybody is a drug running hitman? Must be exciting!
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I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
I don't download (because of the current legal exposure, and because much of MPAA/RIAA content isn't worth my time), but back when I did, it was never about it being cheaper. I would gladly pay significant sums of money for good content offered the way I want to view it. The *AA companies simply don't offer this, are not interested in offering this, and are more interested in suing their customers than figuring out how to offer it.
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You'd be paying that anyway, as you have to have a connection for netflix streaming, so bittorrent would still be cheaper.
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In high school, I would only passively take so much name-calling and such until I'd break the bully's jaw. No, my violence was not justified but I'm human and there's only so much bullshit I'm willing to go through. I expect the parent poster is also human.
When I was in high school I weighed like 60 pounds first going in... 90 the next year, then 120, and 140. Some guy that weighed 250 and was over 6 feet thought it'd be cool to slam me into doors and walls one day... I flop around like nothing, and just absorb the impact, so I laughed at him and he looked dumb as shit. He later was having fun throwing me over his head repeatedly so I grabbed him by the head and took him straight off balance, and kept him on his back.
I'm sure I can take a lot of hammerin
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Personally I'm going to lay this down at one of two places. Either ISP issue on their end or an issue with netflix with their peer. Doing a few quick and dirty traces w/reveres I found that everything off rogers upto llwn was fine, however on llwn I was getting a 5-8% packet loss.
Could be that some areas are seeing more, while others aren't seeing anything at all depending on how things are routed.
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You tried to "go legit" with NetFlix? The entire reason I have a subscription is to burn all of the films and send them back the very same day they arrive!
My current experience (Score:2, Informative)
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immersive suspension of disbelief --lost (Score:5, Interesting)
me too. my mac is fast. I can speed test my connection for both burst and sustained transfers. I can watch Hulu and related without gaps. yet Netflix chokes. Not all the time. Just between 6 and 11 at night.
When you trace route the connection you find it makes about 5 hops in comcast network than about 5 to 10 hops in the limelight network. limelight is netflix's stream provider.
There appear to be huge latentcies-- like 500 milliseconds.
When I talk to the netflix techs they say the latencies are the issue. They cause packet resends.
I point out to them that if their streaming protocol were designed properly, given there is ample bandwidth, they should be able to work around the latency. Besides which I'd be even happier if I could switch between streaming (for browsing movies) and pre-loading them for viewing (like apple).
They say that they have no control over the transfer protocol--that's handled by silver light. and they have no control over the ability to buffer or pre-load because that's set by their drm contract's with the movie providers.
Basically if you want to watch a movie at assuredly good resolution and without gaps then maybe it's worth paying apple a couple bucks to pre-download it. Of course, the drawback is you have to know what you want to watch first.
Having done it both ways I find that part of the magic of a good movie is the immersive suspension of disbelief it creates when it is uninterrupted. So these interruptions are more than just annoying. They move the experience to a different part of your brain-- the part that likes TV not the part that suspends reality (like a good book can do).
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I didn't see a difference between my 360 and my Mac when I was using Netflix Instant play. I cancelled my Netflix subscription 2 months after the trial because I got tired of having to set up the instant play queue on my Mac and then go watch it on my 360. Maybe when they add the ability to at least search on 360 I'll get it back.
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Only valid if the system uses TCP to stream. Many realtime streaming protocols use a custom/semi-custom transport protocol layered over UDP, such as RTP.
Re:My current experience (Score:4, Informative)
I have upgraded to 7 Mbps service from Qwest and it works like a dream. I have Tomato on my router so can view the bandwidth as a real-time graph and I see pulses of around 5 Mbps down with about a 25-33% duty cycle.
Obviously you need to pipe the Roku output to something to display it. I pipe it to my TV instead of trying to watch movies on my Mac. But the convenience factor is very nice.
The Roku player has also just had a firmware upgrade that allows you to tie the player to Amazon as well as to Netflix. They say even more is coming. But it's now possible to rent or buy movies from Amazon to watch on the Roku too. Quality is the same as Netflix movies as best I can tell.
One thing to watch out for if you want to rent a movie on Amazon and have a Netflix account - make sure it isn't available on Netflix already for streaming viewing. It's interesting that a number of Amazons movies available to rent or buy are also available through Netflix as part of your regular account.
I use computers for lots of stuff but for me, watching a movie or TV show on a big display in my living room or bedroom is much nicer than sitting at my desk or holding a warm laptop.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>Qwest Zone - download videos
I thought internet neutrality made it illegal for ISPs to block other providers (like Netflix) simply to boost their own products?
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No laws currently exist either way, but ISPs (at least US-based ones) are currently operating in a net-neutral manner in order to keep common carrier status and therefore not be liable for any of the illegal downloading their customers do. It's certainly in their best interest to continue doing so; trying to force their own service over a competitor's may net them a bit more cash, but it would also allow them to be put directly in the crosshairs of $100B mass copyright infringement suits from the RIAA and M
Re:Sue them (Score:4, Informative)
Done that test. (Score:2)
I've done that test. Qwest DSL and comcast cable suck equally.
I discussed what I think is the real issue in this post [slashdot.org] above.
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This must be the 20th comment slagging kdawson.
You know, there's two ways of looking at this ... one way being that the article is posted and the community then gets to either verify or debunk it. If Netflix WERE throttling, instead of individual IPSs, the only way to know would be to get people from all over
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If something is self-evidently crap from the get-go, there isn't much point in getting everybody's feedback.