Video Expectations in Hulu

**mears** · January 4th, 2009, 03:49 PM

I'm new to boxee and I wanted to see what others are experiencing while streaming video from Hulu. When I watch any show (The Office, Friday Night Lights, etc.) the video is choppy to the point where it's unbearable to watch. Does anyone else get this or is the video pretty clear?
Setup is ATV 2.3
Cable Modem linksys Wireless router. I actually have the ATV plugged directly into the router.
Boxee Launcher 2.2 latest updates.

Even the video in other programs is choppy. CBS CNN...

Has anybody modified the default settings within boxee after the install? Any tips for a newbee?

Thanks....

**larrydavis** · January 4th, 2009, 08:20 PM

It's choppy. Since Boxee relies solely on CPU and can't take advantage of any GPU it's going to likely always be a bit choppy.

And that's infortunate. As much as I love Boxee, I nearly never use it anymore because I just got tired of the choppy playback on just about anything using ATV. I understand their desire to make it cross-platform, but they are doing it at the expense of a quality user experience. Rather than leveraging the underlying platform (be it Mac, PC, or ATV) team Boxee instead relies on ffmpeg, which makes is cross-platform, but gives it terrible performance on a lower end machine such as the ATV.

And that's too bad. I suspect they could make a better experience, but that would require breaking from the ffmpeg requirement, which I think their egos can't handle

**tcaudill001** · January 4th, 2009, 08:27 PM

The ATV experience is not as good as Hulu on the Macbook Pro, or Tivo HD recorded, or iTunes Store TV downloads at $1.99 a piece, but it is very tolerable given the price ($Free), and a great alternative when the Tivo misses a show, or you want to check out something new a friend recommended.

If you are expecting BluRay then you will be disappointed, but the sound is solid, and there are certainly some shows that come across choppy but very watchable for the most part.

**larrydavis** · January 4th, 2009, 08:30 PM

I'm not simply talking Hulu, even trying to watch a video or DVD is choppy on ATV using Boxee.

Sure, the price is free, but Boxee is a business. I don't expect the same from XBMC, I do from Boxee.

**larrydavis** · January 4th, 2009, 08:51 PM

Let me quick add that I do realize Boxee is in alpha, so my comments should be understood in light of that. It's not bug free or perfect yet and I don't expect it to be. But I do have real concerns about their architecture choice because I don't believe the ATV will ever work given the current decisions to do all CPU.

**dan1son** · January 4th, 2009, 11:16 PM

I find the AppleTV with boxee very capable of playing back DVD quality video. The only video on the thing I have major choppy problems with is Hulu and some of the other Flash based video. The flash player being used could definitely use some tweaking to get it to play 480p video from the web.

The h.264 podcasts and internet video sites (even most 720p ones) playback perfectly, as does all of my own handbrake encoded DVDs. As long as you don't expect 1080p or even high bitrate 720p video the ATV is perfectly capable. I get 'choppy' playback on 24fps video, but that seems due to a lack of 2:3 pulldown in AppleTV (hopefully they fix that soon...)

I've watched the CPU and playing back a DVD encoded with handbrake over wi-fi on an NFS share uses ~40% of the cpu. With hulu content the CPU is completely pegged.

**RomanG** · January 5th, 2009, 01:08 PM

IMO,

As long as Boxee continues to use CPU only processing on ATV, the ATV+Boxee combo will really not yield much of a experience improvement when compared to boxes that have more CPU power.

Should they re write the wrappers for the various players to use more of the available GPU, I don't see why video from channels like Hulu etc. should not match the SD content from iT.

Nightmare to manage fundamentally different architectures for different HW platforms though ... especially in startup mode. Perhaps in the future ?

Roman.

**jhauer** · January 5th, 2009, 02:25 PM

I must say that since I hard wired the components Boxee needs for playback (ie ATV wired to router and laptop wired when playing DVD content) I do not have the issues with choppy video. I regularly watch programs on Hulu, stream video from my hard drive and watch DVD's streamed from the DVD player in my laptop. Very good stable quality.

I know hard wire isn't possible for everyone but I think my DLink 802.11g just wasn't cutting it.

Other than some SMB share issues, which I suspect are Vista issues, I have found the latest Boxee to be very stable and reliable.

**eloist** · January 5th, 2009, 03:01 PM

Mine runs and looks great...honestly.

I'm running ATV 2.3, comcast cable internet on a wireless G router and its great.

It hiccups slightly every now and then, but it's not annoying at all. It's actually much better than I expected.

Running video from the home network off of my external is great. No hiccups at all whatsoever.

**somecallmechief** · January 5th, 2009, 03:26 PM

I have the same issue. ATV 2.3 with the latest Boxee build. I've tried every new Boxee build since I first received an invite, and Internet streaming has never worked. Either the videos would never load or they were so choppy as to be unwatchable. I moved my ATV directly onto my cable modem, with no luck.

This isn't an issue of processing power, I don't think. The video quality when Hulu (for example) does load (for 1-2 seconds) is acceptable. Instead, it's something of a networking/connectivity issue. Hulu, for example, is constantly buffering. Video will play for a second and then stop to buffer, repeating ad nausea.

Boxee on my iMac performs better than expected, with no issues.