2. home-theater
  3. 134050-2981

I picked up a ROKU, I am wanting to cut the Cable TV cord.

I first tried the ROKU hooked up to the TV with an HDMI in the Great room/Living room and it worked well. We even watched a couple movies on Amazon Prime. No dropouts or buffering. (ROKU is connected to 60mbps speed internet through a switch with CAT5e.)

Last night I thought I would try it in the HT room and see how it worked and how the picture quality looked there.
Hook up of the ROKU to the switch again by CAT5e. From the output of the ROKU I connected the HDMI cable to an HDMI input on a Marantz SR8002 HT receiver.

I then turned on the equipment and set the Marantz to the correct HDMI input port and the ROKU home page came up just fine. I checked YouTube and it seemed ok. When I tried Amazon Prime it loaded fine. But, when we found a movie we wanted to watch, it started to load, but then an info block came up on the screen of the TV saying there wasn't enough bandwidth to load the movie. I tried again 2 or 3 times, same thing. I knew the problem was not the Ethernet cable. Works fine when using it for Netflix.

So what the heck was the problem? I even tried a different HDMI input port on the Marantz. Why? I don't know but I did....
 For a test I disconnected the ROKU HDMI cable from the Marantz and connected it directly to an HDMI input port on the Samsung LED TV. I then attempted again to watch the same movie on Amazon Prime as I tried earlier. Movie loaded without a glitch. Not a dropout or buffering glitch once throughout the entire movie.
What gives?

Jim
jea48

Showing 1 response by jwargel

jwargel
1 posts
 
Wanted to answer the question.  The reason you see buffering on some services and not others is simply the quality of the engineers and how many hops you are from a server.  In late 2016 ISPs estimated that Netflix accounted for 37% of all traffic during peak hours.  Netflix is hosted on AWS, which is the same as Prime Video...but Netflix is neurotic about availability.  So much so they developed a tremendously cool piece of code called Chaos Monkey.
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Chaos-Monkey
If you are curious about the topic read up, but the tldr version is that they have a team that does nothing but make sure when things break everything continues on like absolutely nothing happened.

I cut the cord about 3 years ago, it has not always been easy but my favorites are:

phone:  https://www.obitalk.com/obinet/
tv over the air: https://www.silicondust.com/
and for the WAF: we run all Apple TVs (I have a hidden amazon fire)
We pay monthly for Hulu, Netflix, Prime and HBO.

More to discover