Friday, March 09, 2007

Amazon Unbox with TiVo trial part 2


Amazon unboxWhy haven't I posted sooner?  Well, it's because the damn movie is still downloading.  When I go into the Now Playing screen it says that only about 30 minutes of the movie have downloaded, which is totally pitiful.



Possible reasons (it's important to note that I downloaded 6 30-minute episodes from iTunes the other day in about 2.5 hours):



  • DSL speed.  I have the 1MB download package from Qwest though I rarely seem to be able to sustain the 1MB speed.  With that having been said, I download movies and tv shows from iTunes all the time and am not that affected by the amount of time that I want to either switch back to cable or upgrade my DSL speed.



  • Network traffic to the internet.  The only thing running simultaneously is basic web browsing on 2 machines and AIM text chat.  I suppose there might be a little bit of an effect, but I can't imagine it's too extraordinary.

  • Internal network traffic.  I'm not doing any massive file transfers and I know that the TiVo has a strong connection to the wireless network (the Airport Express doing WDS is in the same room) -- generally even with other network traffic it only takes me about 2 hours to download movies from the TiVo and convert them.

  • TiVo overload.  I have to admit that I don't really know how much processor power the TiVo needs to download.  The TiVo has been on, but not recording since I started the download; I believe that some previously recorded content has been viewed within the time period.



  • Something wrong with the connection to the download location.  Sure could be, but there's not a whole lot that I can do about that; the only progress display that I have is on the TiVo, which shows me how many minutes in the episode have downloaded.



Bottom line: A little bit less than 3 hours later I've got about 30 minutes of the film.  Total run length of the film is 84 minutes, so by extrapolation that means that I'm looking at it being late this evening before I can watch the movie.



If anyone has any tips, thoughts, etc. please feel free to share them.



Link -- Amazon unbox 


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