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[Windsor] NetFlix Streaming

Pm Sent

reply to Davey77
Marcer may have said this in his PM to you but have you made sure you have set your Netflix account settings to allow HD? I had the same problem when I first signed up and it seems like Netflix defaults its Canadian customers to one of the lower settings. Go to the website and click on "Your Account & Help" in the top-right. Then click on "Manage video quality" under "Manage Account." Make sure it is set to "Best quality."

EDIT: After reading your post more carefully it seems like you are saying you have had HD stream at some point but not consistently. So the above may not apply to you. The fact you are quoting the usage per hour means you have probably already visited the exact page I point you to above.

reply to Davey77
Thanks for the quick replies!

Marcer, I IMed you back. Speedtest is showing 2300/1000. It does show better at times, for sure, though the evening hours do seem quite a bit lower.

vonSchroeder: Yep - I did play with the bandwidth settings on the site, that's how I saw that the connection could tolerate the medium tier. Lowest is really bad video quality, and I just can't quite seem to keep up with the top tier (Best). Are you able to, then?

reply to Davey77
Hey Davey, what are you watching Netflix through and how are you adjusting the quality? I have some friends and family members with various Netflix supporting devices but I haven't seen any quality settings... is that on the device side or the Netflix site side? Thanks!

reply to Davey77
Beleive it or not, upgrade your computer!

It is likely your computer is the bottlenkec, not the network connection.

Read it again. Plays fine on low quality; buffers on medium, particularly at peak times. It's extremely unlikely that the computer (if that's the client device in this case) has anything to do with the issue.

reply to Davey77
.. definitely don't want to start a flame war here. Some more particulars:

- Primary playback is a BluRay player - specifically, a Sony - though the same behavior is on my Thinkpad T410 laptop.

- I use Ethernet for the BR player, and wireless for the Thinkpad (though I did try Ethernet on the Thinkpad too)

- To modify settings, you log in to the NetFlix website with your account, and go into account preferences. There is a video quality setting there, and you set it. It's not "by device" as far as I can tell, but rather a generic account setting for all devices which are passing those login credentials.

I think we're still on a bandwidth / latency / line quality type issue in terms of the connection, rather than any end-device, but I really appreciate the suggestions so far!

dave

Thanks Davey, will evaluate this the next time I'm at someone's house who has enough bandwidth to upgrade.

reply to No_Strings
2320Kbps = 1.01 GB / hour, below the stated requirement "(between 1GB and 2.3GB/hour depending)."

Yep - sadly. 14000kbps should be able to handle the stream, though, I would think...

Marcer... I didn't hear back from you on my PM from yesterday (in reply to yours). Is this something that can be investigated by Cogeco, do you think?

Bizarre - I did get it when I just checked. Thanks a lot for that, Marcer - IMed you back.

reply to Davey77
Just to bring everyone back into the loop:

I had a tech come out who did a bit of wiring work outside. He then said everything was good, ran a couple of tests, and things seemed better. I'm still finding the speed results are spotty, though, particularly in the evening hours. I've PMed Marcer on it as well - does anyone know if it's possible to check node congestion as an average, or maybe the backhaul congestion in the evening?

During the middle of the day, I can typically get speeds approaching the stated performance - often 11Mb/1 (I'm on the 14/1 plan). In the evening, though, I tend to run quite a lot lower... 3/1, 4/1... which Netflix considers below the threshold required to run anything higher than med quality.

Could it be his DNS settings? I had great speed on the turbo 14 when I lived in Windsor, I used OpenDNS settings...seem to work for me there, and here in Oakville, I upgraded to the 20mb pack and get 20mb speeds here too....
--
Party On Garth! ... Party On Wayne !
Shwing!

No. DNS problems would only be the cause if he can't watch the videos at all. DNS queries are done upon the connection to a server, his problem is flow.

Again, I compare this to plumbing. The DNS server is basically what tells the water where to go. His problem is that there's... not enough water going to his house.