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Nelson Minar
Blog licensed under a Creative Commons License
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I like paying for digital movies. So I rented The Hobbit last night to watch on my Xbox. The movie was OK. The twelve times the streaming failed and the movie paused while it buffered was not. Amazon’s movie was about 3.5 gigabytes for 170 minutes, or 2700kbit/s. My download speed is a reliable 6000kbit/s. So what’s the problem?  The bandwidth graph above shows the problem; something terribly wrong with the streaming. First, the Xbox client doesn’t seem to buffer much, if at all. Playback would be a lot better if they used all 6000kbit/s and cached to disk. Second, their streaming server seems to have lost the connection ten times in three hours. Naturally they blame my ISP. At least they refunded the rental fee. I like to pay for media, but maybe next time I’ll consider downloading an unlicensed copy. Pirate Bay offers a 2000kbit/s version that I could have downloaded and then watched uninterrupted for free. It was available two weeks before the official release. |
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