3 Hours to Watch SD Rental on Xbox

[Manonfire]

We rented a 1 hour and 49 minute movie and it took that long to play it because of buffering/bandwidth issues. Looking on the forums here, this seems to be a common problem for users. The answer seems to involve running the speed test (which was more than fast enough) then calling customer support. If this is such a long and common problem for users then why hasn't VUDU addressed or fixed it?

[Guest]

Re: 3 Hours to Watch SD Rental on Xbox

We rented a 1 hour and 49 minute movie and it took that long to play it because of buffering/bandwidth issues. Looking on the forums here, this seems to be a common problem for users. The answer seems to involve running the speed test (which was more than fast enough) then calling customer support. If this is such a long and common problem for users then why hasn't VUDU addressed or fixed it?

Manonfire,

I can understand your concern. However, if you take a step back and look at the whole picture, there is no way to solve network/buffering issues 100% for every customer. As some of the main factors are out of our control:

Home Network:
A lot of the time a network reboot solves the problem, which a lot of customer will do before they call us. From there, we suggest opening ports 13200-13299 to allow VUDU to connect without the router?s firewall slowing the data transfer. Every customer has different firewall settings and restrictions in place; we tend to start here with troubleshooting.

ISP's Network:
If the customer's ISP network is slowed, or a hop on their network is having issues, then it's likely that the customer will see buffering. We tend to asks customers for a trace route so we can help determine if there are is any latency on the ISP's network.

VUDU's network:
This is the only part of the connection that we can control 100%. If the customers? bandwidth is cut below 1MB for SD, 2MB for HD or 4.5MB for HDX, then they?ll see buffering. Typically, if the issue is on our end, we'll see buffering from a majority of the customers in the area reporting the problem. Obviously, our goal is to never have any downtime for any movie on the service.

[coops]

Re: 3 Hours to Watch SD Rental on Xbox

The issue may be with the xbox. I hardwired my xbox to the router and had constant buffering even on Netflix, despite having a constant download speed to my pc, using the same ethernet cable, of 25mbs. I connected the cable to my tv and have had no problem watching the last 6 hd movies. Using wireless was a lot more inconsistent though.