Amazon Unbox: Patience Makes (Pretty Much) Perfect

Continued from ‘Amazon Unbox: It (Mostly) Rocks‘….

For some unknown reason, I’ve never been able to convince the Series2 to drive my 37" LCD in widescreen mode (which I have enabled in the TiVo options) via the S-Video interconnect. When I expanded the Animatrix video window to fill the entire LCD frame, the inevitable MPEG-2 compression artifacts became more obvious, particularly within large and (supposedly) uniform-color areas of a given video frame and along sharp image edges. The 6 Mbps material (for which the higher bitrate, I suspect, was employed because this particular content is especially complex both within a frame and in terms of frame-to-frame movement) looked slightly better but not significantly so.

One day later, and with the Unbox menu option now available in the TiVo GUI, I downloaded a free-for-purchase movie called El Callejon de los Milagros directly from Unbox to the Series2. Like most of the previous content, it was encoded at ~3 Mbps. And like the previous content, it took a long time for the download to complete.

Unlike Unbox downloads to PCs (or, for that matter, Video Marketplace downloads to Xbox 360s), which you can begin watching part-way through in a progressive download fashion, Unbox content playback from a TiVo can’t begin until the entire file is safely ensconced on the PVR’s HDD.

Curious about the slow download root cause(s), I did some more experimentation. First, I copied an episode of The Daily Show (which is unprotected, and therefore accessible via both TiVo Desktop and the TiVo web browser interface) from the Series2 to my CAT5-tethered laptop.

Task Manager and Firefox Download Manager reports both suggest a transfer speed of ~2.5 Mbps. The D-Link 10/100 Mbps Ethernet adapter connected to my TiVo is Hi-Speed (480 Mbps) USB-capable; even though the TiVo technical support representative I spoke with insisted that the Series2 USB ports are also Hi-Speed capable, he also admitted that "USB transfer speeds are dependent upon what other higher-priority tasks the TiVo is simultaneously doing at any particular point in time."

To ensure that the Amazon Unbox website wasn’t the bottleneck in the transfer process, I downloaded to my laptop the Animatrix videos that I’d already downloaded to the TiVo.

Download speeds over my laptop’s Wi-Fi transceiver exceeded 3.5 Mbps.

Over CAT5 the downloads were even speedier, exceeding 9 Mbps. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the Unbox video player smoothly recovered and continued the transfer when I disabled Wi-Fi mid-stream and, in exchange, enabled the CAT5 connection.