Remember when...

[dreamshark]

If you wanted to see a movie from years past you only had two choices - wait for it to appear on TV or hope that it became such a cult favorite that it would be shown in the kind of movie theaters that show old classics? Unless it was a Disney film and then you had to wait for the 7-year rerelease cycle to roll around again?

And then VCRs came along and you could actually rent movies and watch them in your home! Or even buy them and then you could watch them whenever you wanted. But every now and then you got the chance to record an old favorite from TV, so of course you did that whenever possible and then hoarded those old tapes for years?

Okay, I'm cleaning the attic. And trying to remember why I have been carefully saving all these shelves and boxes full of blurry, practically unwatchable old home-recorded movies for the last 25 years. Oh yeah, that's why. I remember how hard I worked to amass this complete set of Red Dwarf tapes, many with sound that is practically inaudible, others with crappy pictures. Now I can watch any episode I want on streaming Netflix. Still, it was hard tossing them all in the garbage.

Wow. Look at all those empty shelves. Enough room to store all the commercially produced VCS tapes that I'm not quite ready to get rid of, although we never watch them. Progress, I guess.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

We're moving towards the point of disposing of old tapes ourselves. (I bought a modern TV last weekend, and got it all hooked up to the Comcast DVR box and the Blu-Ray box; still haven't hooked up the old analog sources.) So far we've identified maybe three tapes (well, at least one is a SET of tapes) that we want to try to transfer to digital (which we don't have equipment for), but there's some hope of finding modern media for sale, and especially in small quantities like this, we'll go for that first if it's possible (save the equipment cost, time, and learning curve of doing it ourselves, get a better quality result, and support the artist a bit).

I still need to transfer a bunch of vinyl, though.

I'm still waiting for IPHouse to do something about out inability to stream even YouTube quality video at all reliably. They said they were adding capacity to our "link". I just poked them again yesterday. Which leads me to ask -- your broadband is fast DSL with Qwest as the ISP, right? Since I'm reasonably confident we're served by the same Qwest exchange, your experience ought to relate at least somewhat to what I would see if I signed up for the same service. And you can stream NetFlix HD "reliably"? Does that mean you hardly ever see glitches, or a glitch or two an hour, or what? (I counted more than 5 glitches, mostly pauses over a second, in 7 minutes of video the last time I tested this; I don't think I'm asking for too much, but I need to be sure I'm comparing apples to apples with you). Qwest has a dismal rep as an ISP, but I only care about IP service; we don't use email from IPHouse, or web space, or any of the other "ISP" services. We could also of course go to Comcast, but since they're the natural enemies of NetFlix....

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I have 12 Mbps DSL with Qwest. And yes, streaming Netflix works great. Not sure if it is HD, however. I'm mostly watching TV shows. There are sometimes a few momentary pauses or picture blurriness as a show starts up, but once it's under way it's smooth as silk. Netflix is apparently using some sort of very clever algorithm that degrades the picture quality to the level necessary to keep the jitter down. I have no idea how they could do that dynamically, but apparently they do.

Although Netflix works well, I still have occasional problems with YouTube videos. Some play perfectly smoothly from the get-go, others need maybe 30 seconds of buffering before I start playing them.

How are you getting the signal from your DSL input to your output device? If you are running over a wireless connection, that could be the point of constriction. Although you would think that 54 Mbps would be plenty fast enough to keep ahead of any possible level of DSL, such is not the case. DSL always runs at the same speed (theoretically, anyway), but apparently wireless speed is deeply impacted by distance and signal strength. I'm no wireless expert, but from what I read on the Intertoobs, typical bandwidth on a wireless network is about 30% of the max speed. That's a lot of variability!

As for Qwest as an ISP, they seem okay to me. I don't use them for mail or as a website or anything like that, but providing reliable Internet connection is part of the ISP service. When I first got upgraded I was reading Qwest DSL forums and saw people complaining about variable ping speed, so I started checking it myself. Sure enough, my ping speed varies from a normal speed of about 50ms to as much as 300 ms during busy times.

This is apparently a meaningful variation to people playing online shooters on very fast gaming systems, but seems pretty negligible to me. I don't know how it compares to VISI, as it never occurred to me to monitor my ping speed back when I was using them.

Try pinging at different times of day and see how variable it is. Of course the tricky thing there is finding a site that doesn't itself slow down at certain times of day. Just pinging your local DNS server can be instructive, as it gives you an idea of how much congestion there is in the local ISP network itself. Or ping qwest.com.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Most of my testing is from a wired connection, and nothing slower than 100Mb internally. Yeah, wireless pretty much promises NOT to deliver the full nominal speed in most real-world situations.

Given the cost of disk these days, it wouldn't shock me if they had multiple versions of the video stream stored on disk at the server, with an index of equivalent points; the server could then switch to a lower-res stream at the next marked point, without having to do any on-the-fly compressing. This also allows for compression being expensive enough to not be affordable per-stream on-the-fly (which is certainly something the Sun server I worked on wanted to avoid). (I don't recall that ours had much bandwidth fall-back; which, in hindsight, I'm surprised wasn't a point customers were bringing to us. Seems like an important feature.)

300 ms is very slow for pings I've observed through ip-house. I think that would annoy a clever video streaming system much less than a first-person shooter (3/10 second is solidly into the range of human reaction times, so a player on a link that slow is going to be behind the curve in a serious conflict), though, and I don't believe anybody in the house plays such games; I know I don't. I should write a script to log some ping times systematically for a while.

I'm currently trying to avoid going to Comcast, since putting the specialized video delivery and the streaming competition to specialized video delivery through the same pipe sounds a lot like putting too many eggs in one basket to me.

Thanks for the descriptions of what you get. While "perfect" is, in general, best :-) , a relatively few minor glitches at startup only wouldn't bug me too much. Waiting for some buffering at startup in return for no glitches would be fine with me, too (I know they do some buffering at that point).

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"300 ms is very slow for pings I've observed through ip-house."

Just to clarify, most of the time when I ping qwest.com the ping times are 48-52ms with very little variation packet to packet. Now and then I see the longer ping times - usually around 150-250 ms. 300 ms is worst-case. Usually the variability packet to packet isn't great, even in a period when the pings are running slower. Variability is probably more important for streaming traffic than latency.

If you want to check throughput, there is a nice little tool on the Qwest site itself that runs a short upload/download test for you. (And yes, I did verify it against a couple of other online bandwidth testers just to keep them honest). My download speed is always somewhere between 11 and 12 Mbps, which is about what I'd expect.

Speed tester is here: http://minneapolis.speedtest.qwest.net/
Easy to use, hard to find.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I did understand that the 300 was an extreme case, not the norm.

The Qwest speed checker looks convenient. Work gets 13.5 down, 15.2 up, just now :-). Less competition for the upload, presumably; I doubt the underlying upload capacity is actually greater.

I've rarely gotten as high as 3Mb/s on my home link as rated by speedtest.net; I'll try the Qwest one from home tonight.