7 ms·
I assume carriers limit only the _bandwidth_, and count on streaming apps to react by automatically degrading the resolution.
by jrrrr 5y ago
I assume carriers limit only the _bandwidth_, and count on streaming apps to react by automatically degrading the resolution.
- 3pt14159 5y agoI don't use Apple TV much, but one of the things I like about it is how it lets me download the video file locally. The quality is so, so crisp. I pay for the more expensive version of Netflix, but it's not quite the same start to finish.
- drclau 5y agoNetflix mobile apps allow you to download most content, too, so you can compare the quality to streamed content. However, then you are limited to phone/tablet screen size for comparison.
- closewith 5y agoI only wish their Apple TV hardware allowed you to do this.
- dhosek 5y agoI thought it does—we rented a movie with Apple TV at one point a couple years ago and waited for it do download to local storage before it was played. Unfortunately, I had opted for highest quality at a time when our network connection was being really flaky and it took a day to do so.
- Pulcinella 5y agoYou cannot unfortunately: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211825 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211825 Maybe certain streaming services allow you to download as well though their app on the Apple TV, but most of the big ones don’t (Apple, Netflix, HBO, etc.) I really don’t like it because, besides wanting to pre-download something for higher quality, there are often certain shows and movies my kids want to watch over and over and they might as well just live on the hard drive. So I have a 64GB Apple TV and most of the storage is empty. Theoretically it’s for games, but ATV games are limited to 100MB and then anything else has to be downloaded after the game has installed. (In practice there aren’t any games near that big). I suppose device might also progressively download the video in the background and that would use storage, but that’s all an implementation detail and entirely up to the heuristics of the device.
- dhosek 5y agoOoh, I hadn't thought about the streaming services. I was really annoyed to discover that a movie I'd downloaded to my iPad from Disney+ would not play if the iPad was connected to a TV which was damned obnoxious. This was a rental from the Apple TV store and not an Apple+ stream, so maybe that's where the difference comes in.
- warrenm 5y agoIt wouldn't play to a TV via AirPlay? Or via cable?
- jrockway 5y agoYeah, I hate watching 15 minutes of something at low quality because one TCP packet was dropped. Paranoia leads to the most user satisfaction ("at least the show didn't freeze") but I would rather buffer the thing locally and watch in uninterrupted 4k @ 50Mbps or whatever. (Also, what's the point of gigabit internet if I can't watch a measly 50Mbps stream?)
- beardedetim 5y agoMost players that use adaptive bit rate allow you to set it at a constant one instead, with the buffering and all. I feel the same way and often click a specific rendition and then let it buffer locally.
- OJFord 5y agoBut Netflix (which GP was talking about implicitly by the comment they replied to) doesn't.
- douglasisshiny 5y agoSure, but Netflix uses HLS, I assume, and doesn't have segments that are 15 minutes in length. So if you did drop a tcp packet, you're more likely to have lower quality for 10-20 seconds, not 15 minutes.
- gowld 5y ago
- tomc1985 5y agoPiracy is also great for this
- gattopalla 5y agoAgreed
- 3pt14159 5y agoYeah and I hate pirating. Don't get me wrong, I do it, but only because Disney+ isn't available in Cyprus while I'm traveling or what have you. I make triple what would put me in the 1% in Canada. I can easily afford to pay for content. It's only UX issue for me, not a resource constraint. I'm happy to fund creators, but please just make things easy, transparent, reliable, and high quality. I can't count the number of times I've tried to pay for something legitimately only to have to resort to piracy because of one flaw or another. Disney (and similar) should be hosting weekly Ask HN posts to fix their cyber issues they're so obvious.
- tomc1985 5y agoThere's no reason to need to take a "moral" stance here. Our rights as consumers to have and hold things without third-party DRM are being systematically ignored, and we are being forced into a bullshit rental model where no one provider holds everything you want. Piracy solves this problem. You should be proud to pirate, proud of sticking it to the assholes that want to control us and our entertainment, proud of wounding an industry that tries to wriggle out of compensating the real artists as much as it can through shifty accounting, predatory contracts. and laughably low royalties payouts. Steal music and buy concert tickets
- warrenm 5y ago>but only because Disney+ isn't available in Cyprus That's not [always] the vendor's fault (sometimes it is - often enough, however, it's varying levels of government interference) Also: VPNs are a thing
- fomine3 5y agoI want to opt out Adaptive Streaming entirely from all services. It's better to have buffering time (actually rarely happen) than seeing fucking 480p video.
- Beaver117 5y agoWhat? No, I'd much rather see a few seconds of low quality than the stream simply stopping to buffer.
- spoonjim 5y agoDoes it download it in Blu Ray quality? (~10GB per movie)?
- bluedino 5y agoNot likely as a common workaround was streaming over a VPN service or SSH tunnel.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoThey could throttle bandwidth selectively, based on destination IP address range.
- Mindwipe 5y agoIn Netflix's case they don't even need that, the content will be coming from an OpenConnect cache in their premises.
- jtbayly 5y agoNo, that still makes sense. They limit the bandwidth to/from a particular domain. The VPN hides that. SSL doesn't.
- franga2000 5y agoThat actually makes it more likely. They're limiting speed to certain IP ranges, corresponding to streaming provider servers. If you connect via a tunnel, the destination address is different and therefore your traffic isn't throtteled.
- asow92 5y agoHLS handles this well.
- jakub_g 5y agoThis; "adaptive streaming" is the keyword. A video on the web is actually a series of mp4 files which are a few seconds length each. They are generally assembled at runtime via JavaScript or native technology into continuous playback. The browser/app monitors whether chunks are downloaded fast enough to assure continuous playback. That's also why often streams start in low quality (to minimize buffering time) and once the app knows it can go to higher resolution, it switches at the next boundary between the chunks.
- redisman 5y agoHLS automatically will download a smaller res chunk if it can’t keep up. Video players (and some formats) react to strangled bandwidth