Netflix poor quality

Advertisements

Yes, twice. The first was just the usual nonsense about restarting the TiVo blah, blah and the second they said to call their support line and I got tossed around to a few people, tried the same old crap they always suggest, and then they said they would get back to me. They haven't.

 

Could you post your ticket number(s) so others could reference them in their calls?

Thanks,

-KP

 

06761879
06970657

 

Here's the ticket # they gave me 07145814

 

Advertisements

That will get hard to manage quickly...how about add them to the end of the list:

07149813
07146896
07143677
07152402
06761879
06970657
07145814
07153076

 

It would appear that the latest software fixes this problem.

Unbelievable! The very second I posted this the problem re-occurs. :banghead:

I was watching for a few hours; all good - then it crapped out.

 

Really?!

That's GREAT news!

How much have you watched to 'compare' with previous?

-Kyle

 

At the risk of jinxing myself, my Netflix feed from TiVo has been flawless for the last week or two. I've watched a few films all the way through and it never dropped in quality.

Hopefully it won't reoccur. But that was an awfully long time to wait for a fix.

 

Good news!

Bad news: The Roamio I was inquiring about most likely spent several hours under water due to Harvey...The owners had to be rescued from their attic!

-Kyle

 

I have been watching this thread for a fix to the problem. I haven't seen the drop in quality for a while either, and it seemed to be quite frequent before. Running a Roamio Basic on OTA.

 

Sorry to hear that Kyle. It certainly puts things in perspective.

 

So tonight I started watching a movie and the quality immediately started dropping to garbage. This after not seeing a drop in quality for a while. Of course it is Saturday night, probably the busiest night for Netflix. As usual I would get about 10 seconds of HD and 30 seconds of unwatchable junk... UNTIL the end credits. As soon as the end credits began it was HD quality for the duration of the end credits.

I don't believe this is a glitch or a bug. I have been watching Netflix all week with no issues, and Saturday night it shows up. I believe Netflix is overloaded on prime viewing nights, and they are purposefully throttling the stream to the devices used by the least numbers of people, and TiVo is right there at the bottom. TiVo doesn't have the pull to stop Netflix from doing this, and Netflix doesn't care about TiVo users, so really the only fix for this is to go with a different streaming device. I have been actively researching options, especially to replace the OTA portion of our viewing, should TiVo eventually abandon OTA customers all together.

After having TiVo on DirecTV for 8 years I was really hesitant to switch to their DVR, but after using it I found I no longer missed TiVo at all. Right now TiVo is arguably the best OTA DVR system out there, but I have a feeling based on what I am seeing being developed that the day will come when I don't miss my current TiVo either.

 

I think it's more likely to be a glitch and not some blatant throttling of a subset of subscribers. I watched Jaws last night and it didn't drop in quality at all.

No doubt there would be more stress on their servers on the weekend, but I'd expect an occasional drop down to a watchable 480 at the most.

 

Well I have positive confirmation that the latest Tivo release does *not* fix this problem. The drop down in resolution seems metronomic. Resolution goes down, then up, down then up. As a software engineer I'm somewhat tempted to think its not a bug; its mechanical, and deliberate.

 

A followup to the dropping bitrate problem.

I stopped using my Roamio several months ago as my Netflix viewer due to the bitrate dropping out problem that's the subject of this thread. About 2-3 weeks ago I decided to give it another try and up until last night, it was working perfectly. I was able to watch over 25 hour long episodes of 3 different series without a single dropping bitrate issue. I was hoping that the issue had been fixed. Last night, after watching the first 5 episodes of S2 of Gomorrah earlier in the week I sat down to watch Ep 6 and that's when the old problem came back, just like it was months ago.

Last night TiVo had an issue with their servers, when you opened a folder in My Shows it wouldn't display anything in it, you'd have to wait a minute or three before the folder would populate. I'm hoping that was the reason for the Netflix bitrate issue I had last night. If I'm not mistaken, although the content data itself comes from Netflix CDNs or appliances in my case(Comcast provider) the Netflix application access goes through TiVo servers. I think. In any case, that's what I'm hoping, that with TiVo's server issue clearing up(I think, I haven't checked today) that the Netflix behavior I experienced last night was a one-off related to TiVo's problems and not a return to the very poor performance I saw months ago.

BTW, the episode 6 that I was trying to watch played perfectly on my Sony BD player.

 

Sorry to hear this is still a problem. This worked for me. I described it (in far too many words) in post # 40 of this thread a few months back. The fix was: stop fighting it. Just accept the fact that the TiVo's Netflix app isn't going to cut it. Add an inexpensive Roku player to your home theater. Done.

I still use tivo's Netflix app to add titles to my wishlist when the GUI suggests something I may like, and I really value that, but beyond that I prefer using a stable streamer for viewing. Now my Netflix time is spent enjoying content, rather than struggling with erratic picture quality.

 

That's basically what I did. I picked up a used Sony BDP S6700 to use for Netflix. I did go back to the TiVo for the next episode and it played just fine. This problem is as confusing as it ever was.

 

I know this is an old thread but I may have some new information. I was actually referred to this thread by someone from Netflix as I was trying to figure out why Netflix titles that should have been in 1080p were in fact playing at 480 in spite of a very fast connection.

If you want to skip my long winded explanation, scroll down

First of all, Netflix checked my settings and network and said everything was fine. They said that they were "sending me" a 1080 file, the Tivo player was written by Tivo, not Netflix, and that this was therefore a Tivo issue.

So I called Tivo. Well, that is an hour I'll never get back Basically, during the conversation, Tivo said:

1. Netflix wrote the player.
2. This was NOT a known issue.
3. This is a Netflix issue.
4. Tivo would escalate the issue to see if anyone else reported it.
5. There WAS an issue in February but it was resolved.
4. Tivo was willing to replace my Bolt in an attempt to fix what they admitted looked like a software issue. Huh????

After I hung up with Tivo I noticed that one or two Netflix titles played back at 720 but most played at 480. The resolution never changed once playback started and the playback resolution was consistent per title. So I called Netflix again.

Netflix checked my account settings. AGAIN. I have two profiles.... the playback quality on the one I was using for these tests (and the one they checked on the first call) was set to "highest" and the other was set to "medium". In the conversation, the Netflix person suggested setting both profiles to AUTO and implied that setting anything other than AUTO might cause playback to get stuck at whatever resolution it started at initially and not actually ramp up to "highest".

The bottom line:
I set the playback quality on both Netflix account profiles to AUTO and now playback on all titles eventually ramps up to 1080. This WAS a Netflix issue.

This probably does not address issues of variable playback quality, but it does seem to be a possible cause for lower than expected quality that never changes once playback begins.

Paul