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My ISP enforces a monthly bandwidth cap of 250GB. Normally, that would be plenty, but Netflix is burning through my month's supply in about three weeks! How can I force Netflix to use less bandwidth? (Say, two or three bars of "quality", rather than 4+HD.)

We use Netflix primarily on a "slim" Xbox 360, but occasionally use it via the web site as well. The tools I currently have at my disposal are a Netgear WNR1000v3 which runs our network and an older WGR614v8 which isn't currently hooked up. Can I use these to reduce Netflix' consumption? If not, what other (inexpensive) options do I have?

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    To the close-voter: I was expecting the answer to be router-related and therefore appropriate for this site. But if there's another SE site where this would be more on-topic, I'd be happy to move it there. :-)
    – Ben Blank
    Sep 12, 2011 at 17:51

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If you sign into your Netflix account and click on Account and Settings then click on Manage Video Quality you can set it to use lower quality and therefore less bandwidth.

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  • I was under the impression this setting only applied to in-browser player?
    – Ben Blank
    Sep 12, 2011 at 17:48
  • I thought it applied to all streaming, but I haven't found anything that says definitively either way. I'd give that a shot for now. If it doesn't work well enough, you can probably limit it via the router even more, maybe using QoS (if your router has it).
    – sbtkd85
    Sep 12, 2011 at 18:00
  • A brief test suggests that it doesn't affect the Xbox player. :-/
    – Ben Blank
    Sep 12, 2011 at 18:33
  • Good to know. Sorry that didn't fix the issue. I guess you'll have to use another solution via router and QoS or something similar.
    – sbtkd85
    Sep 12, 2011 at 18:38
  • I stand corrected. After a couple of weeks of watching our bandwidth usage, it seems to have made a big difference. My initial test was based on video quality, which is only minimally affected. (Yay!)
    – Ben Blank
    Sep 28, 2011 at 19:00

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