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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I got Netflix this December 1st and it's been amazing! My wife enjoys it a lot, she sees lots of romantic comedies. My kids watch Lazy Town and I get to see a lot of shows I never heard of such as Archer.

The service is now indispensable for me. I think a lot of people will get this plan, not to save money, but to be able to watch videos faster with less choppyness.

I don't know why but Netflix on my PS3 is lag free, and looks DVD-like. But on my PC or Mac or phone or ipad it's very laggy and takes a long time to buffer and pauses to buffer during the video.

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Different devices can get different streams from Netflix (to support different encoding/decoding and bitrates/capabilities, I expect).

The implementations behave differently, that's for sure. For example I know my Apple TV buffers at the top resolution it can before playing video so it starts in HD. My older TiVo (and my PS3?) start playing instantly but you can notice when it switches over to the higher bitrate streams.

For fun, on the PS3 you can press a button (select?) which will display the current video and audio data rates from Netflix in the corner in a small font. You can watch it adjust as network conditions change.

That's weird, my Apple TV (latest model) starts in a lower res and you notice the HD stream "pop in".

>I don't know why but Netflix on my PS3 is lag free, and looks DVD-like. But on my PC or Mac or phone or ipad it's very laggy and takes a long time to buffer and pauses to buffer during the video.

If you don't mind the reduced quality, you can manually force a lower quality setting. Just hold Shift+Alt (Shift+Option on Mac) and left click the screen. This will allow you to set the bit rate. I'm not sure if this can be done on your iPad and phone.

Your PS3 most likely has a more competant video card than your other devices.

I find it difficult to believe that you can get a device that'd have problems playing back a Netflix stream. Even Intel integrated graphics can scale a 720p stream to 1080 without issues, unless you use a pixel shader-based upscaling algorithm.

add windows and .net and silverlight and DRM monitoring in the stream app and bogus graphic card drivers and other concurrent programs fighting for bandwidth on the same machine such as torrents with the awful bandwidth scheduler of said windows, and you have your answer somewhere.

You must have a thicker wallet than I.

The mid-range laptop I am currently typing on has trouble displaying video fluidly at times which is most likely due to it's lack of a dedicated video card.

My desktop which is running the exact same operating system and core programs plays video much more fluidly, and it has a dedicated (still extremely weak and outdated) video card.

Considering even a Raspberry Pi can playback HD video, there's almost certainly something very wrong with your software configuration.

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