This year, however, my experience was immediately horrible. I could not get past the bandwidth/quality check that happens after the media player browser window is launched. I verified that I had the latest versions of the Flash Player and NextDef plug-in. I rebooted. I tried Safari, Firefox and Chrome. I enabled all cookies and pop-up windows. The results remained the same. When I checked network traffic in Activity Monitor, I saw throughput peak at about 35 kBps.
To determine whether the behavior was specific to the MacBook, I tried to connect from my desktop PC. Nothing new. I then downloaded the mlb.tv application to my PS3. I got some sound and a very halting video stream. That told me very little, but at least was consistent with the small amount of network traffic I had observed.
Very late last night I resumed the investigation from my PC. I was able to get sound and some video. Network throughput was higher, 50-150 kBps. I used the sysinternals Process Monitor to determine the server to which Chrome was connecting, which turned out to be hosted by Akamai rather than MLB itself. I was surprised, however, to discover that tracert showed the server connected to Level3's network in Los Angeles. Akamai's service should connect me to a nearby server; I am in Philadelphia and served by Comcast.
Believing that Akamai uses DNS locality to pick a server, I checked the DNS addresses in my router. Running tracert for these showed that they were both on the Level3 network in Los Angeles. My past experience has been that DNS servers should be local ones specified by Comcast when the router does its DHCP initialization.
Looking through the configuration for my D-Link DIR-825
router, I discovered that an option labelled Enable Advanced DNS Service was checked. I unchecked it and rebooted the router. The router came up with DNS addresses that I recognized as Comcast (68.x.x.x). In fact, they matched the Philadelphia addresses listed at http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.php. I immediately fired up mlb.tv, got an excellent video stream, and saw my network traffic vary from 0 to 1.1 MBps. All is well on my PS3 and MacBook, too.I don't recall checking the Enable Advanced DNS Service option. It may have been added or checked during a firmware upgrade. Had I known that it would override the DNS server information provided by Comcast and instead use a DNS server across the country, I certainly never would have selected it.
