Sky on xbox -blurry picture, adaptive bit rate problem?

toby2111

Watching Sky through my xbox. Picture keeps going blurry, fading in and out, it's very annoying. Only noticed it since I switched to Sky broadband connection , though I'm getting faster speeds. Was never this bad with eircom, and they had slower speeds. When I press X about video quality, it's on auto, doesn't allow me to switch to low, medium and high as it used to. Seems to be lots of complaints on Sky forums about "adaptive bit rate" which they use but as far as I can see Sky haven't fixed it. Anyone else experiencing this? Any solutions?

Spear

It's Smoothstream, so it's chunk based and adaptive. So if the available bandwidth drops, so will the bandwidth. Though there's a few other things that could be interfering.

toby2111

Never happened with Eircom and I was on half the speed.On the old Xbox settings I used to be able to change the picture quality,now its set on Auto.Any things I could try to improve it?I'm connected directly to router so its not a wireless issue.

Spear

Given that Sky are a new service and gathering some attention, I've give an update. After checking some things by PM, Toby's ADSL2 line is capable of, and properly syncs at 20megs and change. It's a good clean, short line. However, the unpleasant reality is that Sky's capacity simply isn't remotely enough to provide any meaningful bandwidth, with his real world delivery dropping to less than a meg at times. I don't know, and can't tell if this is a larger issue with Sky or specific to the local exchange and it's backhaul.

Nonoperational

Probably the backhaul at the exchange. It seems sky aren't limiting the bandwidth of customers at exchanges with **** backhaul like eircom were.