HD Rental download speed

[AnonymousCoward]

The first HD rental I dl'd, a Saturday afternoon the weekend after the update, was 300, and it took less than 15 sec. to be able to play.

The last 2 HD rentals I've done in the evenings have dl'd slow as molasses. As in it's upwards of an hour before it'll even allow to play slow.

What's the deal?

Is Comcast throttling my connection or is the hamster getting tired at the apple data center?

 

[NightStorm]

They aren't served by Apple. They are hosted on Akamai servers and they have plenty of bandwidth.

I've rented 3 HD titles now, and have been able to start watching all of them within a minute of pressing the button.

 

[Divindude]

both of my HD rentals last Sunday took 2 hours to get to the point of watching and a total of 4 to 6 hours to complete (the first movie stopped an hour into it), the second movie I waited until it was done.

I have a 5mb internet service

 

[pdpfilms]

I'm trying to watch Michael Clayton in HD right now... it's downloaded 10% over the course of 2 hours and still won't let me watch it. What's the bitrate/size of these files?

 

[Cave Man]

I'm trying to watch Michael Clayton in HD right now... it's downloaded 10% over the course of 2 hours and still won't let me watch it. What's the bitrate/size of these files?

They are all less than 4 gigs.

 

[pdpfilms]

So... a conservative calculation of the download speed:

10% of 4gb = 400mb

400mb over 2 hours = 3.3mb/sec (AT MOST)

That's half my normal download speed from iTunes. What gives?

 

[gr8tfly]

Michael Clayton was 1:10 until I got the "go ahead" to watch. 3mbps DSL - Looked like it was doing 340KB/sec (I sometimes do get 380, so not sure why, but it would have only been 5 minutes difference anyway.).

I've rented several HDs now, and they look to be around 1GB/00:30. It works out to about 555KB/sec. So, unless your connection starts to approach that rate, it's going to be quite a few minutes to start.

 

[gr8tfly]

So... a conservative calculation of the download speed:

10% of 4gb = 400mb

400mb over 2 hours = 3.3mb/sec (AT MOST)

That's half my normal download speed from iTunes. What gives?

It's ~4GB for 2:00, which is 555KB/sec. Just going to raw bps, thats 4.44mbps.

 

[gkarris]

HD Downloads is getting rather popular....

On my slow 768K DSL, it took a good 12 hours (split between 2 evenings as I turn my AppleTV off at night).

 

[Avatar74]

The first HD rental I dl'd, a Saturday afternoon the weekend after the update, was 300, and it took less than 15 sec. to be able to play.

The last 2 HD rentals I've done in the evenings have dl'd slow as molasses. As in it's upwards of an hour before it'll even allow to play slow.

What's the deal?

Is Comcast throttling my connection or is the hamster getting tired at the apple data center?

Go here, the next time you're experiencing a slow download. If your performance is well below your subscribed speed (more than 20% below) then Comcast is either throttling you or, more likely, Comcast's shared bandwidth is oversubscribed and you're feeling the pinch.

If the test is ok but the HD Downloads are still slow, then there's a bottleneck elsewhere (but not necessarily Apple... since the signal is traversing several routers across the net it could be hiccups somewhere behind their pipe that isn't along the same path traversed by the traffic to/from the URL I gave you.

One way to tell is to run a traceroute and look at the ms delay on pings at each hop... but maybe that's more information than you wanted.

At the very minimum, find out if it's Comcast shafting you... I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[dejo]

The last 2 HD rentals I've done in the evenings have dl'd slow as molasses. As in it's upwards of an hour before it'll even allow to play slow.

What's the deal?

Is Comcast throttling my connection or is the hamster getting tired at the apple data center?

Cable internet is notoriously slow in the evenings because you are essentially sharing your connection with all your neighbors surfing for pr0n.

 

[Consultant]

HD Downloads is getting rather popular....

On my slow 768K DSL, it took a good 12 hours (split between 2 evenings as I turn my AppleTV off at night).

AppleTV even when turned "off" will still continue to download purchased / rental content from Apple.

You guys should open Activity Monitor to check speed.

 

[gkarris]

AppleTV even when turned "off" will still continue to download purchased / rental content from Apple.

You guys should open Activity Monitor to check speed.

When I mean off, it's OFF. I stop the download, put it in sleep, and cut the power using a powerstrip... I don't like the heat it's dissipating. Though on the 2.0, it seems a lot cooler when idle or sleeping.

 

[gr8tfly]

A
You guys should open Activity Monitor to check speed.

That won't help when renting from the tv. It'll only show network traffic on the machine it's running on.

 

[kolax]

Cable internet is notoriously slow in the evenings because you are essentially sharing your connection with all your neighbors surfing for pr0n.

Exactly. Only, downside of ADSL is that nearly all if not all providers (in the UK anyway) have bandwidth limits (usually 20GB for middle range internet speeds).

I'd check any other users on your network if any are downloading, or uploading. Uploading is what will kill your bandwidth. My 2MB connection (this is how far Britain is! Although Virgin are upgrading all 2MB connections to 8MB in the next few weeks, can't wait) has a 15kb/s upload rate. If I upload at even 9kb/s it almost kills the download speed.

 

[pedz]

I am on cablevision on long island and just ran that speed test link mentioned above on my laptop using the ethernet cable from my apple tv and got a download speed of 9.3 megabytes. I rented jesse james earlier today (around 11:30am) and it took longer than usual to download. It took 5 minutes to start playing (longer than previous hd rental but still ok) but paused multiple times while trying to watch it. i let it download for about 20 minutes and then watched it with no interuption.

my previous hd rental was on the weekend and started playing in less than 2 minutes and never got interupted.

Could just be a fluke today or maybe there are more people renting, seems strange since it was the middle of a weekday. and since i didn't test my connection speed at the time i rented it could have been that ???