This is the place to ask questions, post problems and discuss the iPad/iPhone/iOS Open Beta.
If you have problems we need to know:
From my initial testing it looks to be working quite well- I’m actually rather impressed with the video quality over 3G on the iPhone, it looks about as good as when I convert DVDs over to watch on the device. Good job!
Cool and thanks!
Do you mind telling us which device you tried it with?
We’re seeing excellent playback with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad devices. iPhone 3G struggles a bit depending on conditions.
Unfortunately (at least for testing purposes…) I’m using a 3GS, so I don’t have an older device to test it out with. The quality over the cellular network though did rather surpise me. I’ll give it a whirl with my 2nd-Gen Touch when I get back home, though it’ll obviously be running over WiFi and not 3G.
I’m kind of surprised that there’s problems with playback over the older devices… assuming the video streams are using the native encoding formats, all of the devices should handle video playback about the same. The older devices though do have less memory, which would impact how much it could buffer for playback- transmitter throughput-wise with regards to the 3G network, there shouldn’t be much difference between the 3GS and the 3G. Obviously an original non-3G capable iPhone would have an interesting time on the cellular network, though this is something I can (and will) test out later by turning off the phone’s 3G capability.
Actually, doing a bit of checking, it looks like there’s probably a good reason why the video I watched earlier looked so good: I forgot that, with my Jailbroken phone, it’s set to ‘trick’ Mobile Safari into thinking it has a WiFi connection- so if the site is set up to detect what kind of connection is reported by the browser, it may well have been feeding me the WiFi stream instead of one tailored for 3G. I’ll try it later with the ‘unrestrictor’ disabled to see how it works as well- but if it was indeed feeding me the WiFi stream over 3G, I didn’t have any issues with it lagging or stuttering.
It could also be the iPhone 3G we were testing with. It was the only one available. I’ll be interested to hear from others about it.
Other than whatever hiccups that might occur over 3G networks in general, I wouldn’t expect a WiFi connection to be any better. We’re not providing variable-bitrate streams at this time. Perhaps in the future.
Thanks testing and providing feedback.
So does this mean the videos are being re-encoded for HTML5/h264? Just curious, because my Droid does neither html5 or true Flash, so I’m out of luck either way. But I do plan on getting an iPod Touch, if Verizon doesn’t get an iPhone by then. Crosses Fingers
By the way, Droid sucks. Go with iPhone or Blackberry. 
Yes, come join the club, Cody!
Rai’s pouting that his Blackberry won’t let him in!
http://web17.twitpic.com/img/163590681-ff38fef44d3ba17cef782e9358ec7d7a.4c93f2f0-scaled.jpg
I tested it out with my first generation iPod Touch, and it worked great.
Not going to lie i found that this streamed and worked really well on 3g and Wifi. I am using a 3GS and will have the 4 next week so i will deff let everyone kno. I think this would b awesome if there was a full mobile site and mobile forums on Tapatalk or something LOL I love AnimeNetwork It is my new favorite place 
I tested it out here at home with my 2nd Gen Touch and it worked just fine as well. I also tested it out turning off WiFi and 3G so the phone was forced to run on the EDGE network. Yeaaaah, that didn’t work out so well, but given my previous experiences doing… well, pretty much anything internet-wise over EDGE this came a no surprise. The video would run for about 30 seconds and then pause to give it time to catch up.
So, 3G and WiFi: Perfect. EDGE (and GPRS by inference): No go.
It’s definitely interesting to know that there’s just one level of stream for all of the connections- and it’s impressive the level of quality that that it gets. Having an adaptive stream to drop the quality down for slower (EDGE or bad 3G) connections would be a good idea though, since I realize that at least for now quite a lot of people don’t have the luxury of the speedy connection that I usually reside on…
dragonrider_cody wrote:
[quote]So does this mean the videos are being re-encoded for HTML5/h264? Just curious, because my Droid does neither html5 or true Flash, so I’m out of luck either way. But I do plan on getting an iPod Touch, if Verizon doesn’t get an iPhone by then. Crosses Fingers
By the way, Droid sucks. Go with iPhone or Blackberry. :p[/quote]
Droid doesn’t support html5?!? Interesting. Do you have the 2.2 upgrade (Froyo) yet? The Flash player should work. We’d need to detect you’re on a mobile browser and send the same file that the iPhone receives but it should work.
Samsung haven’t released Froyo for the Galaxy S devices yet. I can watch some of the SD videos in the Flash player on the Nokia N900, even over 3G. The lighter, faster files should be a layup for Flash on Froyo.
BTW: That’s not a statement that Flash on Android or N900 are officially supported platforms. Just thinking out loud. 
No my phone is stuck on 1.6, despite repeated promises from those idiots at Verizon and Motorola that it will be pushed out and should fix the issues with my phone. Of course, as soon my phone was outside of its return policy those promises turned to “may or may not happen in the distant future.” So now I’m stuck with a crappy phone that doesn’t do actual flash, doesn’t support video in html5, a proximity sensor that doesn’t work so my ear hangs up on calls, a “home” button that does nothing and is apparently meant as a decorative statement, an r button that has to be hit three times to work, and a whole other list of problems that I’m being told can’t be fixed without an update that may never come to my phone.
Can you tell I’m a little bitter about my phone and service provider?
We added an additional 200 episodes to the beta. There are more guest and registered episodes in this batch.
akpoff wrote:
FYI: The funky CSS used in this forum cuts off the descenders of the last line of the post, so it looked like “There are more quest …”. Ending a post with a period on a line by itself is one way around this cosmetic error.
GUEST QUEST guest quest GJPQY gjpqy UNDERLINED text ____
After not being able to access the site yesterday due to apparent DNS issues, I was able to over lunch today, and since I’m caught up on everything else I’m watching decided to go back and start catching up on Highschool of the Dead using my iPhone and the newly re-encoded mobile streams.
I had a lot less smooth of an experience this time around than before- both the ending and the opening sequences had to stop and buffer several times, and the episode itself stopped a few times to buffer as well- unsurprisingly usually involving the higher-motion action sequences (I was kind of surprised that the sequence toward the end with the bus and flames didn’t bog it down).
Thinking about it though, this actually doesn’t surprise me a whole lot. My initial testing was done with probably my favorite of the shows available, Hidamari Sketch. For better or worse though, by and large Hidamari should encode to a lot lower bitrate in most scenes due to SHAFT’s fairly minimalistic animation approach to it- it’s very high-quality, but they tend to very heavily simplify things not the primary focus of the scene, and it also involves very few really fast-moving sequences that would knock the bitrate up higher.
HotD though is a good bit newer AND has both a lot more detailed animation (and especially backgrounds) and a lot of fast-moving action sequences that are probably pushing the bitrate of the stream up toward the top limits that were set for it- at which point I’m guessing that my 3G connection just didn’t have the capability of keeping up real-time. It still did pretty good I’d say- it was definitely an annoyance that it stopped and buffered- but it rarely took more than a few seconds to catch up and continue on.
When the episode finished, I pulled up a speed test app to get a bead on my connection’s speed- here’s the results of it:
Download: AVG 1931 Kb/s
Upload: AVG 225 Kb/s
Though that’s definitely not a bad speed for a cell connection, it’s questionable whether the numbers are really applicable to this situation since I know that the speed tests usually pick the closest of their servers to the device doing the test and as such there might be more of a slowdown from the TAN servers (which I believe are in Texas) to my device than from a much closer server.
It looks like though for at least some of the streams, the bitrate they’re encoded at is above that which 3G will handle smoothly. It’s here that having adaptive bitrates would be useful- being able to switch to a lower-bitrate stream that slower connections handle better would obviously make playback smoother, at a slight sacrifice of quality.
Still though- simply being able to so easily watch things is quite nice, and given things are still in beta all told I’d say things look to be working rather well.
Thank you so much! I love you guys! :woohoo:
Does this mean there’s any chance of being able to use android here in the future? It figures this is announced a few days after I switch from iOS to Android.
pokeman89 wrote:
As it says Blog / Important Notice for Anime Network Online Users - Anime Network, we do have some stuff for Android. Check it out!
Slowhand wrote:
[quote]pokeman89 wrote:
As it says Blog / Important Notice for Anime Network Online Users - Anime Network, we do have some stuff for Android. Check it out![/quote]
I’ve seen that, and forgive me if I say that’s useless to me. Only the first 5 episodes of the two series I want to see are available, beyond where I am already, and at $2 per episode for that matter. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if froyo does the trick on my phone, and in the meantime, maybe borrow my sister’s ipod touch once in a while.
pokeman89 wrote:
[quote]Slowhand wrote:
As it says Blog / Important Notice for Anime Network Online Users - Anime Network, we do have some stuff for Android. Check it out!
I’ve seen that, and forgive me if I say that’s useless to me. Only the first 5 episodes of the two series I want to see are available, beyond where I am already, and at $2 per episode for that matter. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if froyo does the trick on my phone, and in the meantime, maybe borrow my sister’s ipod touch once in a while.[/quote]
Ok, sorry, didn’t know if you had checked that out yet. I’ll ask on Monday and see if there are any plans for more episodes or not. Check back!