The test video does show the data on the AppleTV. It appears my setting for DNS on the AppleTV was set to my router (which then is set to OpenDNS). I switched the AppleTV to one of the GoogleDNS addresses, and noticed a MUCH faster load time. Cover art on Netflix and on the ATV desktop were loading (where previously they were partially loading, if at all. And the test video jumped to full speed in a shorter time. I could also see pictures when fast forwarding at the slow and medium speed. Previously, that would just give me the spinny wheel of wait.

The one hitch to the experiment.. I did this past midnight, CA time. I'll have to try earlier in the evening, when there is more net traffic.

Also, HBOgo performed a lot better.

Dunno why DNS setting would do all of that. But it seems to. Mostly unscientific observations, with the exception of the test video. And yes, I did make sure to fast forward to parts I hadn't watched before changing the DNS setting, just in case it was still in buffer somewhere. Not likely. But wanted to be clear. I'll also want to check with the new settings, that the first video played on boot is faster. Maybe it takes a couple minutes to warm up the tube for streaming.

That's probably the issue I mentioned. Google DNS is getting you the right CDN node and OpenDNS isn't.

What's happening is that when you ask for stream.apple.com, the DNS servers pick a particular server machine based on which network you are on. If you are using your ISPs servers, you'll always get a server that is in the same data center that all your internet traffic travels through to get to you. This is about as fast as it can be.

Other DNS servers will sometimes select the wrong server machine, so that the data from your stream has to first traverse the internet from that wrong server to your ISPs data center, then down to you. This can be very slow.

The actual speed of the DNS servers is not the issue here, since AppleTV does very few DNS lookups. On a web browser, though, I find Google DNS makes an huge different in browsing speed. So I keep the streaming machines on Comcast and everything else gets Google.

But if streams are fast, you're golden with Google DNS.

I read on the interwebs, that one of the ways around Verizon FiOS throttling Netflix is to NOT use their DNS. Hence my aversion to using Verizon DNS and trying other things.

To be honest, this is a couple layers of network protocol over my head, so I'm chucking darts at the board with my eyes closed on this one.

My mother wants "a phone". She wants it for Jamaica, and to spend $100. Does a no-contract Moto E for $129 have any downsides I'm not thinking of? They'll do the unlocking in Jamaica.

I have heard nothing but good things about it

So, my iPhone 5S (I think S) seems to have shut itself down. Is that a thing? It was just sitting idle on the arm of the sofa and now it is off and won't turn on. I don't think the battery was low but I plugged it in for a while just in case, that seems to have had no effect.

I guess I need to make an appointment at the Genius Bar, but does anyone have any idea what's going on?

Try holding down the two buttons for a few seconds.

Thank you! I thought I had tried that, but either I didn't or this time it magically worked.

My iPhone 4S has been acting up with some weird memory issue. A month ago it reported that it had 0k free memory. I deleted a few gigs of apps and pictures but it still gave me error messages and reported 0k free when it should have over 9GB free. When I synced it with iTunes all the missing memory was reported as "other" or something like that. Restarting the phone had no effect so I wiped it and reinstalled everything, which freed up the memory.

It's still having the problem, though. Sometimes it'll lose a few GBs of memory every day until it's out. Sometimes it'll go a week without losing any memory at all, and occasionally it'll lose all 9GB of memory in about two hours.

Since I wiped it, restarting it now does free up the 9GB again. I deleted a an exercise app that tracks walking, and that slowed down the memory loss a lot. Playing music through iTunes music match seems to eat the memory pretty fast so I stopped doing that.

Any ideas? I've read that this can be due to having it back up to iCloud (which I'm doing) but I tried a fix for that (switching to a backup on the computer with iTunes, doing a back up and then switching back to an iCloud backup) and it didn't help.

Any ideas? At this point I'm thinking of getting the new iPhone when it comes out (if my current one lasts that long).

Long shot, can't hurt to ask. Here at work, a co-worker in the music dept has upgraded her Mac mini. For whatever reason, IT didn't take the old one, and doesn't want to (??). And for what ever reason, she accidently disposed of the external power supply. I don't suppose anyone has a power supply for a late 2006 Mac mini that they don't need anymore? Not sure how well the computer works, and it looks like a replacement is $50-110, and budgets aren't that big.