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Please tell me i am a complete moron

G

gmhag

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 10, 2011
127
2
I've always used my apple tv to stream netflix and it does just that...it streams. Last night was my first attempt at watching a movie through the apple rental side but it wouldn't let me watch the movie. It goes through a loading process and tells me that the movie will be available to watch in 1 hour 15 minutes. What the hell! When i pay $5 to watch a movie it is more or less an impulse buy. Is this kind of wait normal? It just doesn't seem normal to me to have to wait when i could have easily switched over to my cable provider's on demand and watched the same movie instantly for the same price. I found myself completely dumbfounded since i have so many apple products and they are usually very user friendly and make sense. This does not.

What is worse is that while it was "loading" i flipped over to netflix and watched an episode of mad men i figured by the time that was over the movie would be loaded. When i flipped back it said that it still had over an hour to wait. So in order for it to load you have to keep it on that screen the entire time!?!?! WTF!?

Someone please tell me i am stupid and doing something wrong.
 
coorspate

coorspate

macrumors regular
May 20, 2006
107
22
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I rented one from iTunes And it came over within five minutes. I think it has to do with your cable or dsl connection. In order for it to work I founded your connection need to be at least 3mb.
 
H

hafr

macrumors 68030
Sep 21, 2011
2,743
9
gmhag said:
I've always used my apple tv to stream netflix and it does just that...it streams. Last night was my first attempt at watching a movie through the apple rental side but it wouldn't let me watch the movie. It goes through a loading process and tells me that the movie will be available to watch in 1 hour 15 minutes. What the hell! When i pay $5 to watch a movie it is more or less an impulse buy. Is this kind of wait normal? It just doesn't seem normal to me to have to wait when i could have easily switched over to my cable provider's on demand and watched the same movie instantly for the same price. I found myself completely dumbfounded since i have so many apple products and they are usually very user friendly and make sense. This does not.

What is worse is that while it was "loading" i flipped over to netflix and watched an episode of mad men i figured by the time that was over the movie would be loaded. When i flipped back it said that it still had over an hour to wait. So in order for it to load you have to keep it on that screen the entire time!?!?! WTF!?

Someone please tell me i am stupid and doing something wrong.
Click to expand...

When it's loading, it's buffering until it's certain that you can watch the whole movie from start to finish without having to stop and buffer again in the middle. When you're watching something else in the meantime, the time you have to wait will increase since you're not using all of your bandwidth for the buffering of the film anymore.
 
DustinT

DustinT

macrumors 68000
Feb 26, 2011
1,556
0
coorspate said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I rented one from iTunes And it came over within five minutes. I think it has to do with your cable or dsl connection. In order for it to work I founded your connection need to be at least 3mb.
Click to expand...
this is the mail factor. And switching over to Mad Men merely consumed a portion of your connection, leaving less available for your movie to download.

Now, if you have a connection that should be fast enough to handle downloading the movie and it wasn't, I would start to ask about your network environment, like are you on wireless or a wired connection? The reason is that Netflix, like many streaming companies, will lower the quality of the video to match your bandwidth. Apple, prefers quality over quantity and will send only full quality video but there can be delays. So, if you have a wireless connection, even though your internet connection maybe fast enough, the quality of the wireless signal isn't enough to deliver all that bandwidth to the Apple TV.

I have a wired connection to my ATV and a 12 Mbs internet connection. Movies and TV shows play in HD instantly for me, maybe a 3-5 second delay at most. When I use wireless, even with 5 bars of signal, it can take minutes to buffer the movie if there is heavy network traffic at the time... Ethernet FTW!
 
M

mmagbee

macrumors member
Feb 16, 2009
39
0
It's hit or miss for me. Netflix works flawlessly and usually the itunes rental works as well. I do get the 1hour wait time when i rent HD movies but even though it would say 1h+ wait time . Within 5 min it's ready to roll. I wish i had something new or something original to offer, but I dont . Just wanted to say its not just you
 
Caliber26

Caliber26

macrumors 68020
Sep 25, 2009
2,325
3,637
Orlando, FL
It happened to me once and I was confused as hell because all my Netflix streaming was working flawlessly. I couldn't figure out why the iTunes rental was giving me a 3-hour wait. Turns out that Bright House (my cable company) had accidentally moved my internet down to Road Runner Lite, from the normal 10Mbps I'd always had. After they reset me to my normal speed the wait went away.

Moral of the story: check to make sure you have enough bandwidth and that your wireless set up is allowing you to reach decent speeds.
 
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