Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that mostly a QoS issue?
The Internet doesn't have QoS.
Try tunneling things thru VOIP packets and see if you notice a difference
Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
151–160 of 763 posts
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#152A 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…
On a related note, if you watch Netflix in Chrome or Firefox then you're only getting a resolution of 720p.
Google Chrome
Up to 720p on Windows, Mac, and Linux
Up to 1080p on Chrome OS
Internet Explorer up to 1080p
Microsoft Edge up to 4K*
Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
Opera up to 720p
Safari up to 1080p on Mac OS X 10.10.3 or later
*Streaming in 4K requires an HDCP 2.2 compliant connection to a 4K capable display,
Intel's 7th generation Core CPU, and the latest Windows updates.
Check with the manufacturer of your system to verify specifications.
I really wish they'd just allow up to 4K streaming on all main browsers. The Windows 10 app is awful and very buggy for multi-monitor setups. The two main issues I run into with it are:
1. The video will stutter unless I set both my monitors to the same refresh rate. As you can imagine, it's somewhat annoying to have to lower the refresh rate of my main monitor from 144Hz to 60Hz whenever I want to watch Netflix.
2. When playing in fullscreen on one monitor, the video will randomly minimize if I interact with any applications on my second monitor! So if I want to look something up online or whatever as I'm watching, I have to switch to windowed mode or I risk having the video just minimize and mute itself.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last mile networks do.
Yeah, but nobody trusts ISPs to prioritize traffic; that's what the decade of net neutrality discussion has been about. If they start prioritizing Zoom over Netflix now, it just opens the door to continuing that prioritization (for pay) after the crisis.
I'm not sure if I buy the argument that doing something weird during a state of emergency is a valid cause to keep doing it outside of it.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#154Is this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not having any issues with this in Finland.
It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine. Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.
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Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#155Kodi and mpv continue to work as normal...
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.
I am using Emby, since that seems to be the only one of those platforms that can handle IPTV
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine. Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.
It's not an invented problem. In Spain, ISPs like Telefonica and Vodafone are posting tweets are telling newspapers that people need to use the Internet with responsibility [0]. They also passed a law yesterday that allows ISPs to close connections if they know they're being used to spam the network. Maybe in Germany is different because people are more used to work from home or just being at home while watching Netf…
"the internet" from a dedicated fiber line is not the same as "the internet" from a oversubscribed 3G cell tower in the same country.
Running better/more aggressive last mile QoS in the affected regions would make more sense to me, though I can see the advantage of netflix throttling "voluntarily" because this approach may avoid net neutrality violations.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#157Best approach is just cancel Netflix (saying this was the reason) and go back to the torrents -- they will still have the best quality. They are lowering quality (of service or the catalog size, not always video) and keeping or increasing the prices for a while. Using a global pandemic as an excuse is just a new low.
Hogging bandwidth is detrimental to everyone, especially emergency personnel. Please don't do this. The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need. The alternative is having everyone's internet cut outright.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
15M down / 768k up checking in from rural america. I have to stop my camera on video conferences if i want to talk.
My parents have been trying to get high speed internet for years. They're in a semi-rural, but suburbanizing area. They are surrounded by houses that have cable, but their house is older so it doesn't have it. They had microwave for a while, but it didn't work in bad weather, and then the trees got too tall. They've finally resorted to paying the cable company thousands of dollars to bring cable to their house. It's…
I'm probably going to end up dropping $8-10k into a tower and point to point microwave links to two different cities. The ISP i'm on now wants $30K to put fiber in my house, but their network is so bad at the edge that i'd still need to get a loop to something else to get reasonable performance.
I'd still do the tower and resell b/w to recoup some of the costs.
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#159Are there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.
Not Netflix specific but Cloudflare posted some interesting stats a couple days ago: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-shoulders-of-giants-recen...
Re: Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days
#160This sucks. If bandwidth were metered, the market would ration is appropriately. Generally speaking, anything "free" or "unlimited" gets misallocated. When you put a price on something, it gets better.
What’s the point of rationing something that costs a hundredth of a cent per GB? You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.
I think the real problem is that the supply is too inelastic. The marginal cost of delivering more data is trivial, until part of your network gets congested, and then your short-term options are limited. This is the same problem that water utilities often face: it's cheap, until you run out.
Assigning a single rate ($/TB) requires you to make some assumptions that are at risk of being violated in exceptional circumstances. Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of and their options for changing behavior are limited, so this earns the ISP more money but doesn't eliminate congestion during peak hours.