The DIRECTV Genie Mini Client is a neat little piece of technology. It does everything the Genie DVR does and it does it in a tiny, silent package. It’s been a key part of DIRECTV installations for about ten years now, and it’s gotten really good reviews throughout that time. Our tech team got a question from a customer, though:
Does the client have the same picture quality as the DVR? I ask because someone told me the client streams from the DVR and I wonder if it buffers or cuts the quality if it needs to. I want to make sure I’m watching the best quality possible, especially when I’m using the 4K one.
It’s easy to understand why this question was asked. If you’re streaming, you’ll find that the picture quality on the other end of the stream is not as good as when it started. It gets overcompressed and sometimes even drops in resolution. This is done to make sure you get a smooth experience. People don’t want to wait for stuff to start, so most apps will load a low-quality version of a program for the first few seconds. If the internet gets congested, they’ll switch back to that low quality stream rather than start buffering. The overall message is, people hate buffering. I know I do, anyway.
Here’s the good news
The good news here is that both the regular Genie client and the wireless Genie client that’s coming soon both give you exactly the same picture quality as the DVR. The whole signal is streamed to the client — it’s not resampled, recompressed or touched in any way. There’s no downside to using the client, certainly no difference in picture quality. This is true with wired clients as well as wireless ones. There is no “downsampling” at the client level.
The client is small, and that leads people to think it’s not very powerful. It’s exactly as powerful as it has to be, considering that the Genie DVR is doing almost all the work. The client is just accepting commands from the remote and displaying the video. That doesn’t take nearly as much horsepower as recording, scheduling and all of that.
There really isn’t a downside to this other than the client needs a clean connection. With a wired client obviously this isn’t a problem, but people assume that a wireless connection is a problem there. It really isn’t. As long as you follow the guidelines of being no more than 50 feet from the server with no more than 3 walls between, you’ll be fine. Even in HD, the wireless client only needs about a 25 megabit connection to the server. That’s not a problem even for 10-year-old Wi-Fi technology.
Do you have other Genie questions?
If you’re old-school like me, you probably have a lot of questions about the way the Genie system works. You’ll find a lot of tutorials on this blog… just search for “Genie” in the search box at the top. Or, check our our Ultimate Guide to the Genie user interface. You’ll learn a lot. If you still have questions, ask the experts! You can talk to a trained technician in our Novi, Michigan corporate offices during East Coast business hours. Ask any question you need… we’re happy to help! Call us at 888-233-7563. If it’s after hours, just fill out the form below!
