pulling hair out on streaming video

[mossanimal]

i've been trying to get a solution here..... i'm having a terrible time watching online tv (hulu, abc, cbc, etc) through my mac mini to an hdtv.

here are the specs:

Mac Mini

1.83 GHZ Intel Core Duo
1 GB 667 MHZ DDR2 SDRAM
BUS 667 MHZ
54.78 GB in the hard drive

Running MAC OSX 10.5.8

Our DSL tests at 1.5 - 1.8 or so.

We can watch Netflix 'watch now' perfectly. we can watch most news broadcasts, etc.... but we can't watch Lost and Survivor without buffering issues. pausing to catch up only helps for a few minutes... even after pausing for up to 20 minutes! i've tried plex, firefox, safari... and nothing helps.

i'm assuming that the ABC and CBS programming are coming in at a higher quality and are the reasons for the buffering issues... or perhaps it's a flash issue. anyway.... i have no idea how to improve this. there is not a faster internet option for our area as we live in the country and watching tv through the computer is our only option. i just don't understand how we can watch entire movies from netflix perfectly.... and not Survivor!

 

[mossanimal]

just did the CNET speed test... 297.2 kbps

 

[mossanimal]

well... i just realized that i can change flash settings. i increased the memory available for buffering and i can change quality if i need to....

 

[DarkestRitual]

Other than that, it may be the flash codec. Netflix uses Silverlight, which is an easier to stomach codec than Flash. Flash is crap on OS X and Linux. Really on Windows too, just less so.

 

[EndlessMac]

i just don't understand how we can watch entire movies from netflix perfectly.... and not Survivor!

just did the CNET speed test... 297.2 kbps

I know that you said you can't get a faster internet speed but that is really slow especially for the streaming requirements nowadays. I also have Netflix and one of the nice thing about Netflix is that it automatically detects the speed of your internet meaning that it will adjust the quality of the video based on how fast your internet is.

This is most likely why your streaming videos on Netflix doesn't have buffering issues. Other websites don't really allow you to chose the quality of your videos so if they assume most people have a fast internet connection then they will stream a high quality video which means people like you who have slower internet connections will have buffering issues. At your speeds even buffering for 20 minutes won't download enough of the video to make it run smoothly for that long as you have noticed.

The biggest downside of Netflix's auto speed detection is that it doesn't allow me to choose a lower quality for the times when I use my internet for other purposes at the same time. Netflix just hogs up all my bandwidth because it always wants to give me the best quality video.

Other than getting a faster internet connection, I think your only other solution is to ask Netflix to get more video selections or contact those sites you are having problems with to offer a low quality version.

 

[toMACsh]

Can't wait for the video showing the hair going back in...