Netflix on TiVo

[mikeyts]

I think that he was talking about the "Your video quality is..." indicator on the Netflix site's Watch Instantly tab, where I've only ever seen 3 bars with my nominally 15 Mbps connection (TWC San Diego "Turbo" cable modem service, with a potential boost to 22 Mbps when bandwidth demand is low). Of course, we have no idea where their servers are and the nearest could be far away from me--Netflix itself is headquartered up in Santa Clara County (as is TiVo, Inc), about 460 miles from me here in San Diego. When I run those online connection speed tests I get a somewhat lower speed to San Francisco than to LA, 100 miles away (though there could be any number of factors responsible for that)--if the closest Watch Instantly server to me is up there, that might explain it.

[coolpepper43]

What kind of connection do I need to get the 4 bars on netflixs website? I have a speed that is 5 times more than 3400 Kbps. I have the fastest connection Time Warner offers. Can anyone here get anything higher then 3 bars on watch instantly home page? If so, how much bandwidth do you have? Or is 3 bars the highest? Where can you look to indicate the bit rate that is streaming through netflixs website?

[mikeyts]

Originally Posted by Playloud

There is going to be a problem with ISPs that are capping Internet use. Some ISPs have a 40GB cap. How many HD movies do you think you could download before breaking that cap?

Their maximum HD streaming rate is supposedly 3.8 Mbps, which works out to 1.71 GB/hour, so you'd get a little over 23 hours worth of viewing. That's if you got their maximum bit rate encoding all the time, which would require at least a 5.32 Mbps connection to their server (not the nominal speed of your service, but actual connection speed when you start the movie, which will vary depending upon the route from your home to their server and network congestion). Their second tier HD encodings are 2.6 Mbps, needing at least a 3.64 Mbps connection--anything less and you'll get an SD encoding. The second tier HD encoding works out to 1.17 GB/hour, so you'd get a bit more than 34 hours of that before breaking the 40 GB cap. (These estimates, of course, presume that you do nothing else with your connection ).

Is this a problem? That would depend on your appetite for streaming movies, your budget and what your provider charges for downloading in excess of the cap . I've also read that some providers don't charge extra once you exceed the download quota, but throttle your rate until the end of the month, which would probably put an end to your streaming.

[Brainiac 5]

Originally Posted by mikeyts

I've also read that some providers don't charge extra once you exceed the download quota, but throttle your rate until the end of the month, which would probably put an end to your streaming.

With Comcast (which has an admittedly generous 250GB cap), if you exceed the cap twice you're banned from their internet service for a year.

[moyekj]

Cox HSI Preferred tier here has a lousy 40GB/month download limit spelled out in T&C, however from discussions in local AVS forum there are many of us blowing way past that so far without any consequences so I guess it's not really enforced here or many other places either.
Of course if this Netflix streaming becomes really popular and eats into their VOD revenues I wouldn't be surprised if enforcement conveniently kicks in all of a sudden...

[mikeyts]

Originally Posted by Brainiac 5

With Comcast (which has an admittedly generous 250GB cap), if you exceed the cap twice you're banned from their internet service for a year.

That 250GB cap shouldn't be a problem for any residential user. If you're downloading more than that, you should buy business service, or at least install a second modem and router (for which TWC'd give you another $50/month charge) .

[Resist]

Netflix on Tivo will be the biggest advancement for both. Now if they only had all movies on the watch instantly service.

[wkearney99]

Originally Posted by bkdtv

Note Netflix does offer 720p HD content, which -- as viewed on an Xbox360 -- is of significantly higher quality than anything you get today on Amazon Unbox.

You miss my point about streamed vs downloads. Purely streamed is a problem because it's entirely dependent on the current active amount of available throughput. Download, store and view helps alleviate that problem. Even streaming with active buffering to local disc would help, but netflix does not do that. That and if you want to rewatch the program, even to rewind, you consume more bandwidth, again, for the same content.

There are lots of geeks out there that fantasize about unlimited, constant and low-latency connections. Truth is that just does not exist and, frankly, isn't going to exist any time soon. At least not in markets likely to be actual paying customers for the content providers.

[Scyber]

Originally Posted by coolpepper43

What kind of connection do I need to get the 4 bars on netflixs website? I have a speed that is 5 times more than 3400 Kbps. I have the fastest connection Time Warner offers. Can anyone here get anything higher then 3 bars on watch instantly home page? If so, how much bandwidth do you have? Or is 3 bars the highest? Where can you look to indicate the bit rate that is streaming through netflixs website?

I don't think there are 4 bars on that website widget. It looks like it only goes to 3 bars.

[mikeyts]

Originally Posted by Scyber

I don't think there are 4 bars on that website widget. It looks like it only goes to 3 bars.

I didn't think so either, but that Netflix blog article says (under the heading "Delivered Quality"):

Our first-gen PC streaming player uses 1-4 bars to represent the delivered quality, representing 500, 1000, 1600, and 2200 kbps. The 3400kbps encodes are represented as 4 bars. The player measures bandwidth once at the start of the title, and chooses a bitrate for delivery that has at least 40% headroom from the measured speed.

The Roku, LG, and Samsung, players use four dots during buffering in the same way, and Xbox has 4 bars just like the PC player. The TiVo player has a similar display, but with 10 thin bars.

If it can display four bars, it must use a different graphic to do it--the three bar display looks full, and the third bar reaches the top of the box (unlike 3 bars in the Xbox player, in which you can see a faint, greyed out fourth bar, higher than the third).

Maybe it's the web player itself which shows four bars when it starts up? I can't check anymore since I opted in to the Silverlight player beta which, though it says "determining your video quality", doesn't show any connection speed indicator. (BTW, the Silverlight player starts up lightning fast with no stupid "Should I acquire the license?" or "Press Play" prompts). Given the Xbox player, I don't watch on the PC anymore.

[mikeyts]

Looks like I got the new service update (the official one, not the beta), which mostly seems to reorganize TiVo Central, adding a "Video On Demand" item to the top menu (bundling Showcases with Music & Photos and HME apps). Video On Demand has only Amazon, Disney, Jaman, YouTube, Music Videos from Music Choice, Free Videos (aka TiVoCast) and Home Movies by One True Media--no Netflix yet, though I assume that that's where it'll appear when it shows up.

If there are any other changes, I haven't noticed them.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by mikeyts

Looks like I got the new service update (the official one, not the beta), which mostly seems to reorganize TiVo Central, adding a "Video On Demand" item to the top menu (bundling Showcases with Music & Photos and HME apps). Video On Demand has only Amazon, Disney, Jaman, YouTube, Music Videos from Music Choice, Free Videos (aka TiVoCast) and Home Movies by One True Media--no Netflix yet, though I assume that that's where it'll appear when it shows up.

If there are any other changes, I haven't noticed them.

HME streaming now accepts a very restrictive set of .wmv videos (only encodings with VC-1 AP video + 2-channel Constant Bit Rate WMA2 audio) which it didn't with 9.4 software, obviously to work with the impending Netflix HME app.

Plus obviously it has the important scheduling bug fix that some people were suffering from in 9.4.

[bkdtv]

Originally Posted by mikeyts

I didn't think so either, but that Netflix blog article says (under the heading "Delivered Quality"):
If it can display four bars, it must use a different graphic to do it--the three bar display looks full, and the third bar reaches the top of the box (unlike 3 bars in the Xbox player, in which you can see a faint, greyed out fourth bar, higher than the third).

Maybe it's the web player itself which shows four bars when it starts up? I can't check anymore since I opted in to the Silverlight player beta which, though it says "determining your video quality", doesn't show any connection speed indicator. (BTW, the Silverlight player starts up lightning fast with no stupid "Should I acquire the license?" or "Press Play" prompts). Given the Xbox player, I don't watch on the PC anymore.

My impression, which could be wrong...

Certain programs, like Heroes S3, show three bars, and then refresh again showing a display with one bar. I think that may be how they indicate four bars. Their screen only fits three bars, so they display the same screen again with the fourth bar. I've noticed that a number of the Netflix HD programs show up in SD in this manner. Quality is very good.

Sometimes the bars show and then hide so fast on my screen (maybe cause of 20Mbps connection?) that I barely see them. The bars are on my screen for only an instant.

[SirDucky]

"Video On Demand and Netflix: In talking with Tivo Tech support this morning (slowness issues since update)... The rep said Netflix was to be included in this update and will appear in the "Video On Demand" section. I told the rep Netflix is not listed and her response was it will be available soon. There was no ETA provided.

[dougdingle]

Originally Posted by mikeyts

Their maximum HD streaming rate is supposedly 3.8 Mbps, which works out to 1.71 GB/hour...Their second tier HD encodings are 2.6 Mbps, needing at least a 3.64 Mbps connection--anything less and you'll get an SD encoding. The second tier HD encoding works out to 1.17 GB/hour,

Is this a problem?

Only if you care about the quality of what you are seeing.

For sake of comparison, OTA HD is right around 19 Mbps, and even Time Warner's highly stepped on Los Angeles feed is around 12-13 Mbps. An hour of ER before they started stepping on it was 6.9-7.2 Gig of S3 space; now, it's around 4.9-5.1 gigs and looks like crap (breaks up with large pixelation) much of the time if there's any rapid motion or big light changes, or dissolves, or, you know, anything but static talking heads.

So based on disk usage and the OP's numbers, the "top tier" is compressed THREE TIMES AS HARD as the already crappy TW signal.

No thank you.

[moyekj]

Originally Posted by dougdingle

Only if you care about the quality of what you are seeing.

For sake of comparison, OTA HD is right around 19 Mbps, and even Time Warner's highly stepped on Los Angeles feed is around 12-13 Mbps. An hour of ER before they started stepping on it was 6.9-7.2 Gig of S3 space; now, it's around 4.9-5.1 gigs and looks like crap (breaks up with large pixelation) much of the time if there's any rapid motion or big light changes, or dissolves, or, you know, anything but static talking heads.

So based on disk usage and the OP's numbers, the "top tier" is compressed THREE TIMES AS HARD as the already crappy TW signal.

No thank you.

Those numbers are for mpeg2 encoding. Netflix is using VC-1 AP which is much more efficient, so right there you can cut the size by 1/3 and still not notice a quality drop.

[bkdtv]

Originally Posted by dougdingle

So based on disk usage and the OP's numbers, the "top tier" is compressed THREE TIMES AS HARD as the already crappy TW signal.

No thank you.

Be aware that:

1. Netflix HD uses 720p24, which takes less bandwidth than 1080i and 720p60 broadcasts.
   
   
2. Netflix is using VC-1, which delivers a comparable picture in 30-40% less bandwidth than MPEG-2.
   
   
3. Netflix creates its library of 720p24 encodes from high quality copies. They aren't recompressing an already highly compressed copy on the fly like TWC. The higher the quality of the source, and the more time spend on the encoding, the better the final result will look.

The result is a HD copy that probably doesn't look as good as what you get with your cable or satellite, but it's still far better than SD. You shouldn't see much blocking because other techniques are used to limit bandwidth requirements (i.e. reduction of detail during complex scenes).

Did I mention that all Netflix HD content was commercial free?

[mikeyts]

Originally Posted by dougdingle

For sake of comparison, OTA HD is right around 19 Mbps, and even Time Warner's highly stepped on Los Angeles feed is around 12-13 Mbps. An hour of ER before they started stepping on it was 6.9-7.2 Gig of S3 space; now, it's around 4.9-5.1 gigs and looks like crap (breaks up with large pixelation) much of the time if there's any rapid motion or big light changes, or dissolves, or, you know, anything but static talking heads.

So based on disk usage and the OP's numbers, the "top tier" is compressed THREE TIMES AS HARD as the already crappy TW signal.

No thank you.

Are you certain that it's TWC's fault? Have you compared the size of recordings of an OTA broadcast to a recording of the same program from the cable rebroadcast? Locally I briefly suspected TWC of messing with the bit rate of NBC, which is now hovering around 12.5 Mbps when it had previously run more like 15-17 Mbps. As it turns out, that bit rate is coming from the broadcaster, who's currently running two SD subchannels in their stream (Universal Sports and Weather Plus, I think) along with the main channel, reducing the potential bit rate of the main channel. It sometimes causes encoding problems in programs with lots of fast motion scenes, but it's not always a problem. Wednesday's episode of Life was crisp and flawless, as was ER on Thursday. Sucks for sports, though.

In any case, that has nothing to do with Netflix streaming video: your local broadcast channels are encoded in MPEG-2, whereas Netflix streaming video is encoded in VC-1 (a encoding promoted and principly created by Microsoft, now an open SMPTE standard which is part of the Blu-ray spec--see this). VC-1 Advanced Profile is a much more efficient encoding than MPEG-2, needing as little as one third the bandwidth to produce equivalent picture quality. Also, NBC is encoded 1080x1920 at 60 fields/sec (30 frames), whereas Netflix encodings are 720x1280 at 24 frames/sec (less than half the pixels/sec; 24 fps is the standard framerate of film).

I've watched several hours of it at this point and can tell you that it's quite decent PQ, with no break-ups that I've seen. Certainly it compares favorably with broadcast HDTV, though not with good Blu-ray encodings. As I stated before, once it has surround sound, it'll be good enough for about 90% of what I watch--I'll rent Blu-ray for the rest. But don't let me sell you on it--if you subscribe to an unlimited Netflix disc rental plan and own a TiVo S3, HD or HD XL you will soon be able to try it for yourself (or you can try it now if you own an Xbox).

[Playloud]

I went from TWC in Redondo Beach, CA, to FIOS. I noticed the SD feeds of T:SCC looked noticeably better on FIOS. I transferred the show to my Laptop, and the file size was indeed bigger. I only recently got an HDTV, so I don't know how their HD file sizes compare. However, I can say for sure that TWC's SD feed is heavily compressed.

That's a shame that they are offering "streaming" vs "downloads". Downloads are much better, and with all the copy protection they have, I don't see the need for streaming.

[rainwater]

Originally Posted by Playloud

I went from TWC in Redondo Beach, CA, to FIOS. I noticed the SD feeds of T:SCC looked noticeably better on FIOS. I transferred the show to my Laptop, and the file size was indeed bigger. I only recently got an HDTV, so I don't know how their HD file sizes compare. However, I can say for sure that TWC's SD feed is heavily compressed.

Are you sure TWC wasn't broadcasting the SD channels in analog? The SD channels on FIOS are digital so you would certainly see a difference in quality and in size.

[Playloud]

Originally Posted by rainwater

Are you sure TWC wasn't broadcasting the SD channels in analog? The SD channels on FIOS are digital so you would certainly see a difference in quality and in size.

When I got my cable card from TWC, the Tivo quit displaying what quality I was recording at. I think that means it had to be digital, otherwise it would still say "best". I know TWC had all channels in digital in my area, so I am certain I was watching in digital once I got the cable card in.

[dougdingle]

Originally Posted by mikeyts

Are you certain that it's TWC's fault? Have you compared the size of recordings of an OTA broadcast to a recording of the same program from the cable rebroadcast?

I can't. I am in a complete and total RF hole. I have no OTA whatsoever. The PQ has dropped on TW coincident with the introduction of the initial dozen or so new HD channels a few months ago, and its overcompressed on all the HD channels on two S3's, so I really suspect TW.

In any case, that has nothing to do with Netflix streaming video: your local broadcast channels are encoded in MPEG-2, whereas Netflix streaming video is encoded in VC-1

Thanks. I'll do a little research. I just noticed that one of my boxes has the version 11 service update which supposedly adds Netflix capability, but it's not showing up in the menus yet.

I've watched several hours of it at this point and can tell you that it's quite decent PQ, with no break-ups that I've seen.

Since you've already experienced it, what speed connection do you think is required for stutter-free viewing of the streaming data? Does the TiVo buffer some of it, or does it keep just ahead of real time viewing? Can you rewind through the entire movie, or just 30 minutes, or?

Thanks.

[bkdtv]

Originally Posted by dougdingle

Since you've already experienced it, what speed connection do you think is required for stutter-free viewing of the streaming data? Does the TiVo buffer some of it, or does it keep just ahead of real time viewing? Can you rewind through the entire movie, or just 30 minutes, or?

I can't say I've seen Neflix on TiVo, but I have seen it on a few other devices. You can fast forward and rewind through an entire movie, but the FF and REW isn't smooth; you only see a small fraction of the frames. That's not as nice as DVD, but works well enough to let you find a scene.

Stutter is really not an issue with Netflix, because if your connection can't sustain a certain quality level, they simply drop you down to a lower quality level.

Most of Netflix's content is available in SD @ 1.6Mbps and 2.2Mbps. It's not great, but I think most would agree that quality easily surpasses Amazon Unbox. Most cable users should be able to sustain that level of throughput.

Netflix's HD is currently limited to around 300 titles and is encoded at 3.8Mbps, as mentioned in earlier posts. If you have a reliable 5Mbps or 6Mbps cable connection, you should be fine. If not, Netflix will drop you down to the 2.6Mbps HD version, and if you can't sustain that, they'll stick you with the 1.6Mbps or 2.2Mbps SD version. If you still can't sustain that, you'll get the 1.0Mbps version, or worse yet, the 500Kbps version.

The Netflix $8.99/mo subscription gets you unlimited streaming on one TiVo.

[mikeyts]

Originally Posted by dougdingle

I just noticed that one of my boxes has the version 11 service update which supposedly adds Netflix capability, but it's not showing up in the menus yet.

Lots of us got that update last night--undoubtably it added some new capabilities necessary for Netflix WI. A week or two ago, they added menus for Jaman and Disney without changing the firmware version; I suspect that the Netflix WI player will be added in the same fashion.

[weldon]

Apparently some people already have Netflix running. I just got the update yesterday and I'm chomping at the bit to try Netflix on my TiVo.

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2008-12/...on-tivo-today/

[ilh]

I got the TiVo update last week, and only just this morning Netflix showed up on the Video on Demand screen. Initial look at an HD source (The Office Season 2) and it looked pretty good.

[mikeyts]

I followed weldon's link to the post in Zatz' blog and was about to post it to the AVS Forum TiVo Series3 thread and saw that a couple of people there were saying that it was working--this was at about quarter of midnight, here on the west coast. I checked my TiVo and it was there as well .

I watched an episode of CSI: Miami in "HD" (this particular episode's encoding wasn't very good, with lots of visible artifacts, when I'd seen quite decent ones using the Xbox). Then I watched an episode from Star Trek: Season One (recently an 4:3 HD version was released on disc, transferred from a cleaned up film source with some improved special effects). I got too sleepy to finish it (by that point it was nearly 2 AM), but it looked pretty smooth. There was a glitch in playback--it just suddenly stopped playing and went back to live TV and when I hit the back arrow I was on the "Netflix Account Information" dialog. When I went back and selected the episode again, it smoothly resumed playback from where I left off. Few things are perfect at launch .

The UI wasn't as slick as the Xbox's "3D" string of cover art, but then TiVo has a tiny fraction of the 360's computational and graphics capabilities. The connection speed indicator is different, as is the way it handles FF and REW--I like TiVo's version of the latter better. But it works, it displays HD streams and no Xbox noise in the background. So far, I'm happy with it .

[weldon]

Netflix shows up in my menu this morning. Maybe I had to wait until midnight Mountain time for it to show up?

My TiVo is activated, and now I'm playing Heroes Season 3 - Episode 1. Gotta catch up!