Hulu Playback Choppy on AppleTV

[DeGrouch]

Just installed Boxee on two different AppleTVs, one at my house and one at my buddy's house. On both, Hulu playback is too choppy to be usable. It plays perfectly through Boxee on my Mac mini, however...so this is probably just a problem with the resource limitations of the AppleTV.

Also, we both had crashing problems with last.fm and shoutcast until we disabled the music visualizer. Please leave the visualizer turned off by default, it hogs too many resources from the AppleTV's puny 1GHz processor and pathetic 256MB RAM.

If you guys can figure out how to make Boxee play Hulu without the jerkiness, you'll all be my hero.

[marcel]

thanks for the report ..we will look into these issues..:)

[agentlame]

one think i've seen reported is that hulu is slow/choppy after boxee's inital install... the general consensus is that this is due to boxee scanning for media, and in turn, scouring the interwebs downloading metadata for said media.

please post back if it clears up in a day or so, that will help narrow it down a bit.

[DeGrouch]

Thanks for reading my bug report. To be more specific:

1. I'm running on a 40Gig (mostly empty) AppleTV which is set at 720p

2. About the music visualizer crashing problem: The problem would happen when we would start playing a song through either Shoutcast or Last.fm and then pull up the menu. The transparent overlay menu is very pretty, but when it shows up over the music visualizer, things go haywire on the AppleTV. The interface becomes sluggish, choppy, and then Boxee would crash completely. (It was either error code 10 or 11, I can't remember). It happened repeatedly on both of our AppleTVs until we disabled the visualizer. With the visualizer disabled, navigating the menu system while music is streaming works perfectly.

[sftl99]

I'm running off a new MacBook Pro and it is also choppy. It appears that the entire video has been downloaded from Hulu, but it has the choppiness of a streaming video when there is internet interference. I have to pause the show for a bit, then unpause and the issue goes away. It's a bit odd.

[woodywoodtucker]

I'm also experiencing the same issues on the AppleTV. I haven't tried all the other videos yet, but Hulu is definitely choppy. I'll post a follow-up when I try the other internet video types.

[RomanG]

Just wanted to share some arbitrary results of random types of test;

1. Hulu & CBS (Which mostly people are calling choppy) can also be described as a very low fps rate. Seems like a constant low fps, audio is fine. fps would be something like half of normal 30-29 NTSC fps (at least that's what I think it is ...) Point is, yes, both channels are choppy/low fps.
2. Some improvement was reached through changing the interlacing options around ... Perhaps I was just 'seeing' things, and the issues have nothing to do with each other. But it seemed like there was a difference when switching them around.

Environment -->
Cox --> Cable Modem --> HUB --> ATV (wired) --> Boxee = choppy
Cox --> Cable Modem --> HUB --> Airport Extreme --> MacBook --> Boxee (perfectly smooth.)

Regards,
R.

[marcel]

hi RomanG

thanks for the insight ..:)

[donniefitz2]

I have done some research, and it seems that this a flash problem and not a boxee problem.

[sewperman]

Most of Boxees TV Shows seem to work well and have limited buffering and a pretty good frame rates with the exception of those shows from Hulu... I could either be something Hulu is doing, a limitation of the AppleTV hardware or a Flash issue. Has anyone tried reinstalling or updating their Flash software??

[chartrapp]

i have choppy playback as well. how would i go about updating flash? the audio comes in fine but the video is very choppy and basically not usable.

anyone have any ideas and/or suggested steps?

I have an 40 GB (empty) Apple TV.

[flamboyant1220]

Same problem here it is to the point were it is unwatchable. I did notice non HD content plays perfect. It is just the newer shows that I think that are HD. :(

[kbelzowski]

Same problem here it is to the point were it is unwatchable. I did notice non HD content plays perfect. It is just the newer shows that I think that are HD. :(

Isn't HD optional for all hulu content ?

[kbelzowski]

Same problem here it is to the point were it is unwatchable. I did notice non HD content plays perfect. It is just the newer shows that I think that are HD. :(

I should be getting my apple tv 40GB in the mail today and I'm really hoping that hulu non HD video plays better than what I've been reading but I'm starting to think that I may have to do a lot more reading to see if anyone as figured out a flash fix or something to help with this.

[nuggyblake]

I should be getting my apple tv 40GB in the mail today and I'm really hoping that hulu non HD video plays better than what I've been reading but I'm starting to think that I may have to do a lot more reading to see if anyone as figured out a flash fix or something to help with this.

Hulu is very jerky through Boxee. Its a combination of hardware/ OS/ Flash limitations. Some of the mod's have speculated that perhaps if Boxee used the ATV GPU directly, this might be mute (Im sure there are legal limits not technical, as Boxee works amazing with non hulu video). If you search the forums there has been a lot of attempts to try all flavors of flash including the latest 10.1.rc2, but its still somewhat jerky.

[kbelzowski]

Hulu is very jerky through Boxee. Its a combination of hardware/ OS/ Flash limitations. Some of the mod's have speculated that perhaps if Boxee used the ATV GPU directly, this might be mute (Im sure there are legal limits not technical, as Boxee works amazing with non hulu video). If you search the forums there has been a lot of attempts to try all flavors of flash including the latest 10.1.rc2, but its still somewhat jerky.

Thanks for the info. I'll have to search around then. Looking for someone that says there has been some kind of improvement before I go through all of the hassle of updating the flash version. If anyone runs across someone saying "this was better than this version", etc I'd love to see it.