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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Spiza @ Sep 10th 2008 8:41AM
The question is how much, and how large. Comcast is cutting people off who go over 250GB a month. I know I probably watch 6-10 movies a month with Netflix. If its really Blu-Ray quality, then that puts near if not over the max a month. I’m thinking if it takes 3 hrs at the 10Mb/s that I get, that would be about 13.5 GB download. That would put me at 18 movies a month, which would be fine, but is 13.5 GB blu-ray quality? If 3 hrs is just till you can start watching and you keep dling the rest, I’ll guess it takes about 4.5 to dl which comes to 20.25 GB and 12 movies a month. That’s with doing nothing else though, so maybe knock that down to 10 movies. I guess it would work for me if the quality is good.
Spiza @ Sep 10th 2008 8:42AM
I forgot to add if the price is right as well.
squiggleslash @ Sep 10th 2008 10:18AM
> but is 13.5 GB blu-ray quality?
Almost certainly. While some people like to quote the maximum bit-rates for Blu-ray media, in practice the maximum bit rate is only used for scenes with a massive amount of movement including new objects or objects off-screen. For example, a corn field filling up the screen with everything swaying back and forth, or, at the other end of the spectrum, the opening credits of the X-Men movies. And that maximum will never be Blu-ray's actual maximum, it'll be somewhere in the region of 30Mbps.
On average, you're looking at 10-15Mbps for a typical Blu-ray disc that uses VC-1 or H.264 compression. Some of that bandwidth is taken up with superfluous stuff that doesn't need streaming - for example, alternative soundtracks, PIP, etc.
Realistically, a Blu-ray quality movie, 1080p, two hours long, VC-1 or H.264 compression, should only take up around 10-15G. You can get an idea of what's possible by considering that a BD9 (8.5G) can store a little less than an hour and a half of Blu-ray spec movie content.
Your estimates are almost certainly right.
daaper @ Sep 10th 2008 11:29AM
Man, I wish I could get 10Mb/s dl speed. From 5pm-9pm I'd be lucky to get half that. Maybe if I downloaded over night, I could get speeds like that. If it has all night, though, I don't really how fast it goes as long as it's done by morning.
Yeah, I see the per movie price being a big factor for me. If it's the $6.99 I've seen others doing, then no thanks. That's almost half the price that I've paid for most of my BRs. At that point, I'd rather just spend another $10 and have unlimited.
Andy @ Sep 10th 2008 11:24AM
Comcast may allow 250, but smaller providers apparently cap around 50gb a month.