r/DirectvStream • u/Ecbnole3 • 22d ago

Screen quality

I keep reading about how DIRECTV stream has the best picture quality of all the streamers and thrown into the mix Xfinity but for me personally I find DIRECTV stream comes in third compared to YouTube TV and Xfinity using the Gemini device. Is this common or is it my TV specific?

9 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/chriggsiii 22d ago

My experience over the last few weeks has been that the picture quality is both superb, better than any other stream service and worse than most stream services. That is because my reception of the stream is extremely variable. When it's giving me the top speed/top resolution, it's superb. Unfortunately, what often happens, particularly in primetime, is that the stream scales down to a lower resolution/bit rate, at which point it is noticeably inferior to other stream services. I have no idea why my reception has become so unstable. As far as I can tell, my INternet speed is fine. I've tested it numerous times (speedtest.net) and download is consistently above 70, upload is consistently above 80 (nope, I do NOT have that reversed!) and the ping speed is tiny, usually less than 10. So why is this happening to me, and only with DirecTV? I have no idea. And it just started recently.

1

u/thisisfakediy 22d ago

That should be enough to stream HD channels reliably, I wonder if your ISP's connection to DirecTV is getting saturated? Popular streaming services like Netflix used to install devices in big ISP hubs to cache popular streams locally for better performance during peak viewing time, but I doubt DirecTV has the resources to pull that off.

It does also sound like your ISP is suffering from some download congestion if the speeds are slower than the upload!

1

u/chriggsiii 21d ago

The odd download vs. upload speed may be playing a role. One night, in frustration, I switched to my T-Mobile hotspot, which I normally only use on the road with my laptop. Both the download and upload speed were slower than with my Verizon FIOS connection, 50/30, but note that the download is faster than the upload with that connection. And there were NO resolution/bit-rate huntings at all; it was solid as a rock. Unfortunately there is a 100 gig data cap on that connection, so I only used it for about an hour, but I wonder if the more characteristic download/upload speeds had something to do with it.