I took a few minutes at lunch today and did some monitoring of bandwidth usage for the the Roku on various channels. Now I had previously checked performance when dish started up their online streaming through their receiver boxes. When doing that I saw maxes of around 8.5Mbps for some things and 4Mbps for other things. Never really below 4Mbps and quality quite good. http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-technical-discussions/268122-dish-streaming-performance.html
Now with my Roku I did some similar tests. One thing that I'm noticing is that the quality is highly dependent on the quality of the encoder used for the channel. Dish seems to have done a great job with their streaming. The Roku channels vary in quality, and all seem to require more bandwidth to achieve what isn't always always that high of quality.
I started with Twit.tv live feeds.
Twit Live Feed BitGravity High - 6Mbps Peak 15Mbps when loading
Twit Live Feed BitGravity Low - 3Mbps Peak 15Mbps when loading
Pandora - Peak 6Mbps when loading - flat once loaded. Press Skip, jumps to 4Mbps, then flat again.
Crackle - Starship Troupers - bumped up on initial load to just over 20Mbps, and leveled out over 3 minutes to around 2-3Kbps. (yes, Kbps... weird)
Amazon Prime - Sons of Anarchy Episode 1 in HD - bumped up to 13-14Mbps and hung around there for 3 minutes. Then dropped to near zero for 2 minutes, then back up for a few seconds. Basically keeping it's buffer full.
Disney - Tron Uprising, how it begins. - Jumped to ~20Mbps on startup for just a few seconds, then dropped down to around 3Kbps
Flixter - Brave Trailer - Hit about 17Mbps for just a few seconds and then steady at around 3Mbps for the length of the trailer.
Quality on the Twit BitGravity Low was terrible on my 56" DLP TV. Crackle was pretty good, obviously not encoded from an HD source, probably just a DVD originally. Amazon prime was really good, as was Disney and the Flixter.
Overall I think this will work pretty well for me, but I think it is important that folks have their Wifi in order. Marginal Wifi will give irritating performance.
Now with my Roku I did some similar tests. One thing that I'm noticing is that the quality is highly dependent on the quality of the encoder used for the channel. Dish seems to have done a great job with their streaming. The Roku channels vary in quality, and all seem to require more bandwidth to achieve what isn't always always that high of quality.
I started with Twit.tv live feeds.
Twit Live Feed BitGravity High - 6Mbps Peak 15Mbps when loading
Twit Live Feed BitGravity Low - 3Mbps Peak 15Mbps when loading
Pandora - Peak 6Mbps when loading - flat once loaded. Press Skip, jumps to 4Mbps, then flat again.
Crackle - Starship Troupers - bumped up on initial load to just over 20Mbps, and leveled out over 3 minutes to around 2-3Kbps. (yes, Kbps... weird)
Amazon Prime - Sons of Anarchy Episode 1 in HD - bumped up to 13-14Mbps and hung around there for 3 minutes. Then dropped to near zero for 2 minutes, then back up for a few seconds. Basically keeping it's buffer full.
Disney - Tron Uprising, how it begins. - Jumped to ~20Mbps on startup for just a few seconds, then dropped down to around 3Kbps
Flixter - Brave Trailer - Hit about 17Mbps for just a few seconds and then steady at around 3Mbps for the length of the trailer.
Quality on the Twit BitGravity Low was terrible on my 56" DLP TV. Crackle was pretty good, obviously not encoded from an HD source, probably just a DVD originally. Amazon prime was really good, as was Disney and the Flixter.
Overall I think this will work pretty well for me, but I think it is important that folks have their Wifi in order. Marginal Wifi will give irritating performance.
