Xbox 360 Netflix and streaming quality question

D

Dreaz

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 30, 2004
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Hey, I'm signed up for the netflix streaming on xbox live but it pisses me off to no end sometimes.

I'm on a University connection so it constantly changes (the bandwidth) and netflix has this retarded automated system that always overdoes the quality on the movies. Because it sees "oh shit, look at all this bandwidth" but of course it's shared; therefore, the allocated bandwidth is constantly changing.

So then about 30 seconds in the movie will "reconfigure" itself because my "internet has slowed". Then it'll do it again and again until it finally reaches a happy medium. Sometimes just doing it once, other times taking 3-5 times.

My question, is there any way to just tell Netflix always stream in X quality? Mostly to avoid these retarded hangups. I don't care if it's not HD. I just want to start a movie with uninterrupted stream.

Thanks.
 
Not that I know of. Sorry about your connection, I know how much that can suck.
 
I just looked on the site and couldn't find anything, try calling them.
 
I couldn't find anything on the site either. I'm gonna give 'em a call and then update this thread with whatever information I get.
 
Tell people in your university to stop downloading or tell your university to upgrade their connection so you can stream hd movies better.

Seriously, man, you can't do anything about it.
 
If I had to take a guess I'd say you're SOL. The NetFlix software on the 360 does this automatically, and there's probably no setting that could fix such a thing. I'm pretty surprised, because the few colleges I've been two (I only attended one, but have visited others), all the network connections were great. I guess they can't all be. :(
 
Jerome36 said:
I'm pretty surprised, because the few colleges I've been two (I only attended one, but have visited others), all the network connections were great. I guess they can't all be. :(
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To be fair, the only time you might notice such a slowdown is when you're streaming video without a decent-sized buffer. If you're playing an FPS you might never notice that your download speed went from 1.5 Mbps to 768 kbps for a few seconds because of local congestion.

Netflix could fix this easily by expanding the buffer in their player software (or making it user definable), but part of the idea of doing it the way they are is to get compatibility with a wider variety of devices (low memory, no/small hard drive) and shoot for the simplest user experience possible. I'm definitely with them on this, and if college kids have to suffer I'm all for that, too. ;)
 
I believe this is a problem on the Netflix side. I have a 20/20mb fiber connection to my house that has been rock solid for the last year. My netflix player does the same thing. It will adjust as much as 2 times on a show/movie usually at the beginning. Let us know if you find out anything.
 
NeoTek said:
I believe this is a problem on the Netflix side.
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If it is, then I hope they fix it for y'all. I can only go by my experience with a 10Mbps/768Kbps connection where the only times I've had the problem described were a) the first night of the NXE (no surprise) and b) when I had torrents running that were using too much upload. The latter could be the root of the problem for the OP since Netflix is the first program with which I've had trouble at my previous uTorrent settings; once I scaled back my uploads by another 10 KB/s Netflix went back to trouble-free "4-bar" performance.
 
NeoTek said:
I believe this is a problem on the Netflix side. I have a 20/20mb fiber connection to my house that has been rock solid for the last year. My netflix player does the same thing. It will adjust as much as 2 times on a show/movie usually at the beginning. Let us know if you find out anything.
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To the OP, I don't think there is a way to choose the quality manually.

To NeoTek, I think this has more to do with the recent overload of new users to Netflix's servers. I noticed that my streaming quality varied during the time of day. Perfect streaming quality during most of the day, and 1 bar at night.

I'm guessing that Netflix is not prepared for the amount of users watching on their Xbox's and it's causing a bottleneck on the server end.

There are numerous threads about people get 1 bar of quality with really fast connections. For reference, I have tested on a 14mbps connect hardwired and 16mbps also hardwired in different states using different ISPs. Same problem. In both cases speedtests confirmed that it was not a connection issue on my end. I was getting 14,000 kb/s down and 2,000 kb/s up and still only got 1 bar on Netflix.
 
It's for sure a problem with the internet connection at the school, and NOT Netflix.

I have tested this in multiple areas in the US as well, ranging from 1.5mb to 16mb connections and always get 4 bars and no buffering issues. This is morning, noon and night.

You should contact their IT department and ask if they plan on upgrading anytime soon.
 
Yeah, I have 8Mbps down, and 1 Mbps up. I have torrents sucking up between 300 and 900 k down (out of 1000 max), and a constant 80 k up (125 max), and the streaming works flawlessly for me. Of course I also have qos setup to give torrents a low priority, but I'm not sure how well it's implemented since only incoming requests will always be on the same port, and also because I don't know what protocol netflix is using. If it's http then it automatically gets a higher priority.

My only problem with netflix streaming is that their movie selection sucks imo. But even with their disc rentals, I don't like much of what they have so it's probably me and not them.
 
Well I live in Alaska and there's really only two outside connections to the rest of the world (one university based--projects, classrooms, etc, and one commercial based--everyone else), so I doubt they'll upgrade anytime soon.

But I've found an odd workaround. If I stream the Netflix movie from my laptop and then Video-out it to my TV, the movies have worked without hiccups.

Why this works? No idea.
 
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