Download speed unusable

Question

I have a new apple TV (2 wks old). During the first week everything seemed to work (except home sharing was totally inconsistent - but that is another issue I think). I only looked at movie previews and they all seemed to work. I noticed that the device would be warm to the touch.
Last night I tried for the first time to watch a movie. "SALT" 1 hr 40 minutes in high def. After a few minutes of loading it reports it will be ready in another 2.5 hours. A few hours later it reports it will be ready in another 3 hours. I have stopped everything, reset to factory defaults, loaded the latest firmware (took 5 hours). The device is always cold to touch now. I ran the download speed test (telling it my speed was 4MB/s) and returned a positive result to the test. I have reset everything in the network and tested the network thoroughly from other systems. I'm wondering if the Apple TV itself has failed. A movie preview that is 2 minutes long takes about 5 minutes to load before it starts to play, and then usually has to stop after playing the first minute.

Answer 1

Ken Wiens wrote:
Thanks - although it still doesn't answer the questions of why the apple TV only uses 50% of the available bandwidth on a wired connection, and why the times varied so dramatically on the movie I mentioned (we downloaded to a separate itunes account first so that we knew exactly the sizes of the movie in both high def and std def).
The question here is whether or not you're truly getting a sustained 4 Mbps - either due to you getting slower speeds due to contention from other users at certain times or your ISP throttling access at certain times/to certain sites, or after you've downloaded a certain quota of data at a certain time of day - the small print of your contract may specify such limitations.
If you know you get a consistent 4 Mbps the times are slow - could be Apple's servers being slow, could be one of the DNS issues reported (basically don't use Google's DNS servers).
Based on the chart you pointed out, the movie should have downloaded in far less time than I am taking. We downloading the high def movie on this network to itunes in 47 minutes, the apple tv is currently looking like it will take about 9 hours. I appreciate that my network speed is too slow according to the apple recommendations - but why is it so significantly much slower than downloading to a PC (the test was done on the same network and in both cases (the pc and the apple tv) all other devices were disconnected first - at the router to ensure a fair test)
Just feels like there is something else wrong here.
Yes, that doesn't sound right.
I get a sustained 3.5Mbps from my ISP.
I rented 3 movies last night on my AppleTV1. The first HD movie said it would be ready to watch in 38 minutes. The second movie I rented (once the first had completely downloaded) was only available in SD and was ready to play in seconds. The third HD film I rented was going to be ready in 40 minutes.
The AppleTV1 was a much better solution for rentals with slower connections as the film stays until it expires or is deleted, unlike ATV2 where other actions can necessitate redownloading most or all of a rental which is only good for a fast connection (but even then wasteful of Apple's internet bandwidth let alone yours).
AC