Call it coincidence or call it fate, but it seems something is afoot in the land of the
Roku Netflix Player. Out of seemingly nowhere, a fair amount of users are finding that their once beautiful downloads have turned to pixelated iterations of their old selves, and to no fault of their internet connection. As the story goes, some users have found that their box is forcing streaming at "one-dot," or the lowest quality selection available, rather than the four-dot connection they were using just last week. As you'd expect, the quality of the one-dot stream is rather dreadful, and for those who've tried forcing a higher quality setting, they're stuck waiting eons for buffering and such. Have you too encountered this issue? Or are the internet elves looking out for you?
[Image courtesy of
PreGameLobby, thanks Tyler]
posted Nov 13th 2008 9:56AM
That movie is sweet. Luc Besson is the man. Leon/The Professional is teh sickness.
No women. No kids. That's the rules.
DO A FLIP!
DO A BARREL ROLL! (Z or R twice)
I get low ranked for a Bender quote? For shame nerds, for shame...
Triple Lindy!!!
It made me laugh....gotta love Bender!
Jeez, Bender quotes downranked? Bad start to the day.
You can force full bandwidth/ 4 dots. I did it and mine works like a charm, although I did move my wireless access point a little closer to avoid hang-ups. I cut and pasted this from a Roku Forum thread: "Using the remote, hit Home Home Home Home Home Rewind Rewind Rewind FastForward FastForward (that's 5 Homes, 3 Rewinds, 2 FastForwards), keypresses about 1/2 second apart. You may have to try several times and the trick is to make the keypresses spaced out far enough. (Remember, the last two are >, which are on the bottom row of buttons, not the < and > keys to the side of the select button.) This will take you into debug mode."
Once you are there you select 2.2 Mbps. It works, flawlessly for me.
I heard that UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A SELECT START also works....just fyi
Yep, news like this definitely means the death of Blu-Ray...
Funny, I heard blowing really hard on the remote before using it helped....
Laugh all you want, but this works like a charm. I am quite rural and all i get is 1mbs dsl, while my friends in the city get 7mbs dsl. not fair, but with this little trick i only wait an extra few minutes for waaaay better quality, btw, blowing on the remote only gets you light headed.
Xbox 360 better not pull this shit in 6 days...
Unfortunately, over the past few days I have experienced similar issues with PlayOn for the 360...Quality went from fantastic to looking like garbage in an instant.
I would think this has to do with Netflix doing some work to upgrade before the deluge of happy 360ites start crushing their system en mass.
Mine works like a charm
Works fine here in Minneapolis. 4 dots from Comcast with 12mb service down.
My thoughts exactly.
I don't have a Roku, just the Netflix streaming plug-in for Vista Media Center. I haven't noticed a drop in quality, but I did notice that I'm not allowed to choose my own connection speed. Netflix does the choosing. Maybe this isn't Roku's doing, but Netflix forcing lower quality streams so it can keep up with bandwidth. Just guessing here.
is this ISP bandwidth capping at work?
I smell a rat.
This is exactly what happened to me, starting about a week after the initial release. I *know* it wasn't my internet connection because I tested it with a wired connection, then plugged the same cable into my laptop and got full quality. I ended up selling the box on eBay, and though I'm looking forward to viewing on my 360, I'm not getting my hopes up. I think Netflix may have a scaling problem.
Sounds like NetFlix might be moving things around to get ready for the NXE next week.
Oops.... My thoughts exactly.
My internet movie streaming has been up and down btwn hulu and netflix... So its either hit or miss for me unfortunately... Cox 20mbps... I run speedtests and they come out okay, so im not sure if netflix and hulu are dropping trow and mooning me as i ask for some good qual streaming...
I've not tried Netflix, but the only problem I've had with Hulu is the stream ending itself too early once out of maybe every 30 viewings. I live in Tempe, AZ with a 1.5 Mbps connection thru Qwest DSL. It certainly shouldn't be your connection speed.
I'm still waiting for MAC compatibility NETFLIX! Hello???
I've watched a couple of Netflix on my Mac now - you have to get MS Silverlight for it to work - takes about two brain cells to find it and get it from the Netflix site. For an additional 7 brain cells, I understand there's a version of Silverlight in Linux, but that's too much effort, I just watch hulu on my Linux box.
Sorry you were out of the country for the last 2 weeks. While you were gone, netflix announced an opt-in for silverlight on their website. use your search bar.
You got iTunes.
Go buy Apple TV.
Working fine for me.
I am having the issue mentioned. Lately Roku only shows 2 dots. I might try the hack mentioned above
If this is in fact a Roku issue, I wouldn't be surprised. Especially after their support, or lack there of, of the Photobridge where they left their entire following high and dry with a defective power supply (a large percentage had their units fail about at a year) and not valid fix (forget what they were charging to fix it, but it was WAY too much).
I fixed mine by replacing all the capacitors in the PSU with 105°C rated types. Cost was somewhere around 20 Euro IIRC.
I fixed mine as well, but I don't know how many people would be able to do that. Besides, by the time I got around to it, I needed mpeg 4 support and it just wasn't cutting it anymore.
Awaiting my Popcorn Hour to replace it, should be here shortly.
I experienced this problem Tuesday night, without the Roku player. I called Netflix technical support and they had me tracert an IP address from my PC, which revealed a timeout problem on one of the servers hosting their movies. Within an hour of my call, they had the timeout problem fixed and I was back up to high quality.
This sounds like the problem, what region/server was timing out, to give people help knowing if they are located near it?
Sorry, I wasn't told the location of the servers/host companies, but I'm in the Houston area with AT&T DSL if that helps any at all. If not, just ring up the Netflix tech support people and they'll figure out if it's a problem on their end or yours. They're quite good.
Mine works fine, 4 dots all the time.
Javovich has got some ass on her.
JOvovich...
Thanks.
Stunt double?
I just bought one, and it worked great for the first 10 minutes, then I got stuck in one dot. Forced the connection to three, but it takes forever to load.
Not happy...
I have had this issue a lot... but I've had this issue mainly over Ethernet (never over WiFi). What I have done to resolve it is to re-establish the connection... after doing that I get a full connection. It's weird, a bit annoying, but easy to resolve.
Just do a power cycle most of you and you will get speeds back.
Sheesh the biggest issue with most of the stream and play services and devices is that the internet is still not quite ready for them. The end user (YOU) has internet speeds which just barely makes it possible. What happened to the old dream of lightning fast net? Where are my 1 second full movie downloads?
I keep mine plugged into a switched surge protector since otherwise the thing is just on all the time even when you aren't watching it. There's no boot up time on it and it really makes sense. So I'm basically power cycling every time I use it. More people should do this.
Agree with you on the pitiful net connection speeds. I have gigabit ethernet in my house, my ISP is the bottleneck...
When has ISP not been the bottleneck?
They are coming soon, to Japan
I user the windows software player, and while I haven't been forced to a lower quality I've been hit for incredibly long load times...
6mbps dsl and 4 dots all the time even though 1 movie was determined to only play at 3 even when all others ran at 4.
I can think of A LOT WORSE frames for the video to freeze than Milla Jovavich wearing that naughty little mummy wrap thing. Pretty much anything from "Norbit" comes to mind...
I use my Roku quite a bit. Everyday in fact and always had 4-dots until last week up until yesterday. During that time, everything I watched was re-buffered down to 2-dots, and at least once it went down to 1-dot. UGH! I'm back 4-dots now and hoping it stays that way.
I have not been able to watch my Roku for the last 3 days.
Ive read rumors that comcast is throttling certain connection types simular to bit torrent streams. I am really upset but don't know who to blame. Comcast, Roku, Netflix, the Sirius XM channel lineup. Circuit City filing bankrupcy, Palin's choice in clothing. Tell me who?!!!
Oh p.s. Hulu get a settop box already!
Jcostanza4
I can imagine that this might be in anticipation of a plethora of new xbox traffic next week
Maybe this will help with this issue:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Zeugma-Roku-Demonstrate-Premium-Internet/story.aspx?guid=%7B8148ED1C-1F65-4017-AF32-187CDA0F4D55%7D
2 dots for me... actually I've never even seen 4 dots, even after reconfiguring for my office's network (multiple T3 lines) so I assumed that it was more Netflix throttling. If they do it (throttling) with the mailed DVDs, why not the bandwidth?
Same things been happening to me online. It says my quality is a one dot connection. I'm like hello. Uh i pay for 50mb a sec connection theres now way i'm only a 1dot connect for an 80s movie of all things lol.
I've been stuck at one dot for particular movies, not all movies. Most movies are at the 4 dot level.
When streaming Netflix movies through Xbox 360, do you have to have a gold acct, or has someone figured out how to connect and just watch their netflix queue? In today's Walmart Christmas AD there's an Xbox 360 for $199.92... will it stream our Netflix Acct?