Forum Discussion

bbefilms's avatar
bbefilms
Visitor
16 years ago

why is buffering much faster with Netflix movies than mine?

The buffering issue still seems opaque to me. I've created SD videos with several different bitrates (1Mbs - 4Mbs) in H264 and it always seems to take forever to buffer the movie before playing; is there a file format preference, i.e. wmv is preferred by the player over H264? And this is regardless from where the movie is streaming from, i.e. a local very fast server or from one of my Internet servers. By contrast, SD Netflix streams seem to buffer very quickly indeed ( maybe 5 seconds, compared to 20-25 seconds with my movies).

Any and all suggestions welcomed.
Greg
Roku Developer Program

4 Replies

  • RokuMarkn's avatar
    RokuMarkn
    Visitor
    16 years ago
    What are you setting StreamBitrates to? Invalid values in there can cause slow buffering.

    --Mark
  • bbefilms's avatar
    bbefilms
    Visitor
    16 years ago
    Thanks Mark; I rechecked my video and although the video was at the described bitrate, the sound bitrate was also very high. Also, the bitrate as set was incorrect, as you suggested. The example bitrate values given in the simplevideplayer script seem completely wrong, or maybe I'm missing something.
    Thanks again.
  • buaboo's avatar
    buaboo
    Visitor
    16 years ago
    I am tying to understand how the StreamBitrates impacts things.. I am using the simplevideo example. I have a video in h.264 that seems to work no matter what I change the bitrates to and I have another one that keeps rebuffering no matter what I do to the bitrates. To make changes to the bitrates, I just comment/uncomment the default values that are in the examples.

    Can you give me further explanation of how this variable works.

    Thank you


    "RokuMarkn" wrote:
    What are you setting StreamBitrates to? Invalid values in there can cause slow buffering.

    --Mark
  • bbefilms's avatar
    bbefilms
    Visitor
    16 years ago
    FYI, there's a great posting (from Netflix) about the specs of their streaming files here; both Amazon (who stream HD at 2.5mbs max) and Netflix (3.8mbs HD max) use the VC1 codec and not H264. I've tested extensively with H264 and will now be trying VC1 (the current level of buffering I'm seeing on high bitrate files is unusable).