I wanted to watch a movie tonight but instead I’m writing this post. You see I only have the one disc at a time Netflix plan and I sent The Town back this morning, which left me without a movie on a Friday night. Sometimes I hit up a Redbox, but the bridge down the street is closed (for three months!) and it has really messed up my routine. So I figured I’d try to get the most out of my three month Xbox Live Gold Membership before it expires, only to be reminded that HDX titles aren’t available on the Xbox. No problem, I’ll switch to my Sony Blu-ray player and watch it there. So I spend the time to enter my Vudu username and password using the remote — who ever thought that was a good idea — and pick out a movie only to be greeted with an “Insufficient Network Speed” error. That’s odd, so I try it a few more times. Same result.
You might be thinking, but Ben HDX requires a lot of throughput and don’t blame Vudu because your internet sucks. But you’d be wrong. Unlike some I have FiOS Internet, which is crazy fast, but every service has a bad day, right? So I fire up Speedtest.net to see what it might be and what do I find? 25Mbps download. You’d think that would be enough.
And this test was ran on my laptop connected via WiFi and my Blu-ray player is connected via a wired Gig connection, which I typically get Gig speeds on. So if someone with all the pieces you’d think would be needed to enjoy high quality HD video via the Internet can’t, then who can? I suspect no one. I guess I’ll just have to watch a different Blu-ray Disc or something on my Media Center, but it won’t be because I didn’t try. We’ll see if Apple’s cloud is more reliable than Vudu’s next week.
Did you try on the Xbox? Maybe it is your BD player. So I assume your getting a new Apple TV. Did you never pick up a gen 2?
I ended up watching an episode of Lillyhammer via Netflix on the Blu-ray player, which worked just fine. I didn’t try the Xbox since I’d rather wait and see the movie in 1080p.
No, never had a gen 2 ATV, at 720p I didn’t feel compelled. Although I did miss the pictures, music and podcasts.
25Mbps is not enough speed, pay for a faster connection they are out there and not for a ton of money. Just watch a bluray on a PS3 you will see the movie is streaming from the disc to the play on avarage around 35Mbps. Sometimes hitting higher rates.