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Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

bbc.co.uk

431–440 of 763 posts

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#431
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jellyfin is really nice if you have a semi-powerful, wired-network machine to run it on. Former Kodi user, now a convert. Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.

What is semipowerful, approximately?

The main thing is being able to handle transcoding for certain clients that need it. I’ve got it in Docker on an oldish workstation I bought for like $100 on eBay and threw an SSD in for the OS, but that thing’s surely serious overkill. If you’re only streaming to one or two clients at a time, being on a wired network and having hardware support for any codecs you’ll be dealing with are probably the most important factors.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#432
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an infinite queue starts to get really high. People Here's a nice blog post about the subject: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/30/server-utilization...

This law does not apply to queueing as encountered in routers. It assumes unbounded queues and a poisson arrival process (i.e. a memoryless channel); both assumptions don't hold for packet routers and senders using congestion control (TCP or otherwise). There is, however, a high chance of encountering buffer bloat if countermeasures are not taken at the chokepoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat Modern cab…

How do you monitor this? The 90% over capacity, would like to see where mine is at

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#433
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the advantage over good ol' fashion torrenting? I guess I'm just an old timer....

Torrenting is on the way out, from what I (as a casual torrenter) can tell. There is just a lot less material available. Maybe it's better on private trackers, but I haven't been a member of one in 15 years, nor would I know how to access/be invited to one even if I wanted to.

Its on the way out for casual use but its still the primary method for enthusiast use, Its the best and sometimes only place to get flac/bluray quality and the only reliable place for console games.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never risk suggesting people use the legal app popcorntime to pirate copyrighted material.

What is the advantage over good ol' fashion torrenting? I guess I'm just an old timer....

Its more automatic/streamlined. The app looks like an ordinary streaming website and all the torrent stuff is in the background.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a joke. They charge me for "Full HD" and don't deliver it? I just downgraded to the cheaper plan with lower definition. If that's what I'm getting, anyway... I mean how is this even legal?

Do you watch netflix on a computer in a web browser? If not, this isn't an issue.

Yes, that's why I'm downgrading. I'm on FF.

After diligent conditioning by Netflix, I've come to enjoy 720p, apparently. On the plus side it means I can pay them less.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#436

I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunate…

Curious, what ISP do you have? Currently moving to a new place in Seattle and have to decide between Wave G or Atlas Networks.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#437

Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)

You could think about the opposite way: it's good that Netflix was using so much bandwidth because it encouraged network upgrades. Now, when we need to use this capacity for something else, Netflix can flip a switch and it's available. Excess usage for luxuries like 4k video in good times is a way of preparing for bad times. Ideally we would treat hospital capacity the same way. In good times, everyone gets a private…

This is also a reason to eat meat from animals fed food for people. In the bad times, slaughter the animals and eat the meat and the feed.

It's changed my perspective on efficiency. There are some forms of inefficiency that can provide a buffer if something goes wrong.

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#438

A few months ago there was blog post posted here from a guy making movie reviews. In the blog post he described how he managed to get 4k Netflix screenshots on his Chromecast. The effort he made was enormous and involved reverse engineering the Netflix data protocol (I probably worded this wrong). When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't actually 4k. Again not exactly sure how this worked but t…

I think you're talking about this article https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2019/02/14/adventures-in-netfli...

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#439
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ISP has been playing the same game with me for months. I finally cancelled the contract when it was about to renew, and I got a very interesting winback call from sales: Not only did the rep freely share the utilization numbers with me (80% during the day and 90% at night), he also mentioned that things would not get better until end of the year when they would do a node split. As consolation, they offered me 10x…

I work in this field in Spain. Margins in this sector are slim, deployment is expensive. EVERYONE works with simultaneity rates, it's the only way to have cheap connections. In fiber connections is actually not that expensive to split a fiber after a CTO, you can actually sort of daisy chain it, but you want to keep everything as standard as possible.

Margins are not slim at all in the USA

Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

#440
Paying isn't enough to get what you paid for, so...

https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill - automatically download TV episodes (about Linux)

https://github.com/CouchPotato/CouchPotatoServer - automatically download Movies (about Linux)

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent - torrent client for downloading your Linux tv/movies...

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