Quote:
Originally Posted by fredr123
So if streaming of the internet directly is what ATV is doing, and I can't do that on iPad, I still don't understand why I can watch it as it downloads on the ATV but I can't do that nearly as well on the iPad. It's not like the one gets to download stuff faster than the other. What's going on?
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Only the ATV can stream direct from iTunes, all other devices, including your computer need to download before you can watch it. Don't ask me why, that's just the way it is. But I've downloaded many things to iDevice/Computer and managed to start the show while it was still downloading in less than a minute as it doesn't need to be entirely downloaded before you can play it.
Your alternative is to download everything to a desktop or laptop and then turn on iTunes sharing on your computer. Then all devices can stream through your internal network.
As for why it streams better on ATV vs. downloading on iDevice? If I were to guess, several things can contribute to this:
- Likely streaming QoS is higher than download QoS since packets must arrive within a short window so that the stream is seamless - if a packet is late it's useless in a stream. Download doesn't matter - when it's done, it's done, packets can come in any order and the download just gets reconstructed at the end.
- Most streams can automatically adjust quality based on connection speed so there could be some wizardry behind the scenes where the stream may be throttled down in quality to be friendly for your connection. It can be so subtle you can't tell.
- They likely encode/compress the stream differently than the downloaded version and the streamed version may offer a smaller footprint and lower quality (again it could be so subtle that you don't really notice).
- The download is always bigger in size even if encoding/compression is the same and there is no auto adjusting the quality, you are always downloaded all audio tracks whether you are using them or not, when streamed they would only stream the track you selected.