Showtime VOD - Dexter Season 6. Partial episodes???

[Muckrak3r]

I searched for Dexter and found all episodes of Season 6 on VOD, surprisingly. Set them up to Record/Download.

Go to watch episode 1 - it kept skipping several minutes and then I couldn't skip back and watch the missed content. Thought maybe it was a bad download, so watched a separately downloaded episode 1. Same result. Then I noticed in the GUI next to the episode title it says 'Partial' - what the heck?

There aren't full, unskipping episodes of Dexter on VOD? What's the point of having them there like this?

[charper1]

I searched for Dexter and found all episodes of Season 6 on VOD, surprisingly. Set them up to Record/Download.

Go to watch episode 1 - it kept skipping several minutes and then I couldn't skip back and watch the missed content. Thought maybe it was a bad download, so watched a separately downloaded episode 1. Same result. Then I noticed in the GUI next to the episode title it says 'Partial' - what the heck?

There aren't full, unskipping episodes of Dexter on VOD? What's the point of having them there like this?

are you sure you arent losing connection during the D/L

[Muckrak3r]

are you sure you arent losing connection during the D/L

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tested it a dozen times today on Pingtest.net and not a single packet lost. I am, however, about to contact my ISP about the way too high ICMP response times.

Short story - It doesn't appear to be dropping packets, which would enable a steady stream on the VOD items. Long story - to be continued.

[charper1]

That's an instant at the moment ad hoc test for ping and line quality; how are you monitoring the entire D/L process for connectivity loss, be it internet connectivity to your premises or the DVR dropping off the network? This testing procedure is not looking at that.

[Muckrak3r]

I wasn't checking my connection quality at all until you mentioned it

Turns out, my call to the ISP was helpful in multiple ways. First of all, there is an "outage affecting most of your state" - so that explains the latency and poor DL speed issues. And until that is fully resolved, I won't mess with this issue any more. Secondly, they offered me an upgrade to their fastest speed package for $16/month less than it was when I asked about it last night!

I will update this thread later once the ISP finishes sorting out their problems. FWIW - I DL'd the Dexter shows a couple days ago, I don't consider them to have been DL'd during the outage, but I have no way to know for sure.

[Muckrak3r]

The ISP fixed the latency issues already and I am getting nearly 40Mbps down. I will try episode 1 again and see if the skipping problem is fixed.

[Muckrak3r]

The ISP fixed the latency issues already and I am getting nearly 40Mbps down. I will try episode 1 again and see if the skipping problem is fixed.

Charper1 - it was the ISP connection causing the skipping issues. Only 5 minutes into the 1st episode that I DL'd again, and it hasn't skipped a beat. Thanks for the idea.