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Hospitals do they normally allow streaming video like Emby ?


ng4ever

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bandit8623

latency has almost no harm on streaming bandwidth.... latency does harm realtime applications like voip.  but for movies and tv shows on netflix/emby/plex latency has very little effect.  now too many hops and you get into peering problems from one isp to another. they could be throttling certain traffic only.  and yes ive been in hospitals that just block ports.  so if you are on a vpn the ports they blocked are no longer blocked....(as long as the port they blocked isnt your vpn port :)

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I'm simply going to disagree in a big way as packet latency can affect video streaming performance more than bandwidth available. High latency can lead to frequent buffering as the client and server can't talk to each other fast enough. You start getting packet loss which just makes it that much worse.

Here's an easy read.
https://www.evdodepotusa.com/low-latency-ideal-latency-video-streaming/

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bandit8623
1 hour ago, cayars said:

I'm simply going to disagree in a big way as packet latency can affect video streaming performance more than bandwidth available. High latency can lead to frequent buffering as the client and server can't talk to each other fast enough. You start getting packet loss which just makes it that much worse.

Here's an easy read.
https://www.evdodepotusa.com/low-latency-ideal-latency-video-streaming/

Only if the latency is Inconsistent. You are talking about very high jitter.  Jitter over 50ms can cause huge problems.

Consistent low jitter 100ms internet service will stream just fine.

 

When you get above 300ms yes I would agree with you it can cause problems .. but even satellite internet is below that.

Edited by bandit8623
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Having worked with HughesNet designing and selling UUNET/News groups to ISPs, I can tell you that these satellites sit in geostationary orbit 35,786km (22,236 miles) above the equator. If you're in North America the distance to the bird is obviously further. At best radio waves travelling at the speed of light is 300,000 km/s or 186,000 mile per second. Cut to the chase and you have about 250ms of "air time" just for the waves to make it to the bird and back with no processing at all. Most of the continental USA would be looking at 280ms one way just to account for the time it takes the signal to travel through the air.

For a round trip internet packet you would double those numbers or about 560ms at the theoretical minimum latency. Real world experience will show however that one-way communication is more like 500 to 700ms or about 1,000 to 1,4000ms for round trip (RTT).

There are also medium and low earth Sats which are much closer to earth. Globalstar sits at roughly 1,400km above earth while Iridium orbits around 670km. These can produce RTT of 40ms or so but do not have the bandwidth for video as they are like old ISDN links at 64kb per second.  Some of the newer Sats are positioned about 8km above earth with roughly 125ms RTT but can potentially deliver 1Gb or fiber like bandwidth.

Keep in mind your exit or actual entry to the Internet for a GEO Sat matters as well.  For example HughesNet in North America has three locations: Germantown MD, Detroit MI, Las Vegas NV.  So from that entry/exit point to the destination will get added on and raise the latency if you're not hitting a service that's peered there as well such as Netflix or a CDN.

Anyway latency is crucial in today's Internet usage as protocols these days are very chatty. As an example just to initiate a secure Internet connections (SSL) requires the exchange of numerous pieces of data between web server and client. Although these pieces of data are small and not bandwidth sensitive the multiple round-trips involved in the handshake produce long delays. Loading a simple webpage with graphics looks like it doesn't work when you're not used to this.  A page might look like it tried to start but "hung", but then it starts to load then appears to pause and then about a second later start to fill suddenly with the graphics. Any kind of java use that allows the page and server to communicate back and forth and it can become a "fun" experience. :)

Like many other services, Sat is often over sold.  Sometimes it can seem fast and other times it's bogged down from over use. This on an already high latency connection just makes matters even worse quickly!

Now think about something like video streaming where the client and server are constantly "talking" to each other trying to keep a few seconds of buffer filled, requesting lost packets, etc and you can see why latency can be much more important than pure bandwidth. No amount of available bandwidth matters if the two can't talk to each other in a timely manner to make use of the bandwidth properly. The high latency makes issues with video jitter much more pronounced and common. It's common to see jitter buffers used in QOS which won't be tested for with a ping or trace route but of course ads to the video latency but helps to smooth out streams a bit. But when packets need resending these buffers get in the way.

Latency and jitter are closely related and somewhat overlap each other, but both are very important to video streaming protocols. One of the best ways to handle this on a streaming platform like Emby is to allow "progressive" downloads or what we might call direct play where the file itself is basically downloaded and the HLS streaming protocol isn't used.

Forgetting all about satellites and just talking normal Emby use.  This is one of the reasons a person can have no issues playing back normal media from their libraries remotely (direct play), but have an issue with Live TV or any file that doesn't direct play (direct stream or transcode). You're then using HLS protocol, which is much more intolerant of latency and jitter issues. 

 

Edited by cayars
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bandit8623
18 minutes ago, cayars said:

Having worked with HughesNet designing and selling UUNET/News groups to ISPs, I can tell you that these satellites sit in geostationary orbit 35,786km (22,236 miles) above the equator. If you're in North America the distance to the bird is obviously further. At best radio waves travelling at the speed of light is 300,000 km/s or 186,000 mile per second. Cut to the chase and you have about 250ms of "air time" just for the waves to make it to the bird and back with no processing at all. Most of the continental USA would be looking at 280ms one way just to account for the time it takes the signal to travel through the air.

For a round trip internet packet you would double those numbers or about 560ms at the theoretical minimum latency. Real world experience will show however that one-way communication is more like 500 to 700ms or about 1,000 to 1,4000ms for round trip (RTT).

There are also medium and low earth Sats which are much closer to earth. Globalstar sits at roughly 1,400km above earth while Iridium orbits around 670km. These can produce RTT of 40ms or so but do not have the bandwidth for video as they are like old ISDN links at 64kb per second.  Some of the newer Sats are positioned about 8km above earth with roughly 125ms RTT but can potentially deliver 1Gb or fiber like bandwidth.

Keep in mind your exit or actual entry to the Internet for a GEO Sat matters as well.  For example HughesNet in North America has three locations: Germantown MD, Detroit MI, Las Vegas NV.  So from that entry/exit point to the destination will get added on and raise the latency if you're not hitting a service that's peered there as well such as Netflix or a CDN.

Anyway latency is crucial in today's Internet usage as protocols these days are very chatty. As an example just to initiate a secure Internet connections (SSL) requires the exchange of numerous pieces of data between web server and client. Although these pieces of data are small and not bandwidth sensitive the multiple round-trips involved in the handshake produce long delays. Loading a simple webpage with graphics looks like it doesn't work when you're not used to this.  A page might look like it tried to start but "hung", but then it starts to load then appears to pause and then about a second later start to fill suddenly with the graphics. Any kind of java use that allows the page and server to communicate back and forth and it can become a "fun" experience. :)

Like many other services, Sat is often over sold.  Sometimes it can seem fast and other times it's bogged down from over use. This on an already high latency connection just makes matters even worse quickly!

Now think about something like video streaming where the client and server are constantly "talking" to each other trying to keep a few seconds of buffer filled, requesting lost packets, etc and you can see why latency can be much more important than pure bandwidth. No amount of available bandwidth matters if the two can't talk to each other in a timely manner to make use of the bandwidth properly. The high latency makes issues with video jitter much more pronounced and common. It's common to see jitter buffers used in QOS which won't be tested for with a ping or trace route but of course ads to the video latency but helps to smooth out streams a bit. But when packets need resending these buffers get in the way.

Latency and jitter are closely related and somewhat overlap each other, but both are very important to video streaming protocols. One of the best ways to handle this on a streaming platform like Emby is to allow "progressive" downloads or what we might call direct play where the file itself is basically downloaded and the HLS streaming protocol isn't used.

Forgetting all about satellites and just talking normal Emby use.  This is one of the reasons a person can have no issues playing back normal media from their libraries remotely (direct play), but have an issue with Live TV or any file that doesn't direct play (direct stream or transcode). Your then using HLS protocol, which is much more intolerant of latency and jitter issues. 

 

good post with great info!

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FrostByte

One of the happiest days of my life was when I cancelled HughesNet.  I got better internet from a Verizon hotspot at half the price.  So glad Starlink has arrived though.

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It was great back in the day when cable or DSL wasn't available or you lived in a remote location.
So much faster than dialup or even ISDN at the time.

But with the way websites have evolved with all the chatter back and forth the latency can be a real downer.

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ng4ever
6 minutes ago, cayars said:

It was great back in the day when cable or DSL wasn't available or you lived in a remote location.
So much faster than dialup or even ISDN at the time.

But with the way websites have evolved with all the chatter back and forth the latency can be a real downer.

Sense we are on topic about satellites how is Cruise ship internet doing? Is it slowly improving or will improve in a few years ? Thanks.

Sorry.

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8 minutes ago, ng4ever said:

Sense we are on topic about satellites how is Cruise ship internet doing? Is it slowly improving or will improve in a few years ? Thanks.

Sorry.

Buy me a couple of tickets and I'll give you a detailed report back.  LOL

If you're doing your vacation correctly you should wonder after the trip if they even had WIFI on board. :)

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FrostByte
10 minutes ago, ng4ever said:

Sense we are on topic about satellites how is Cruise ship internet doing? Is it slowly improving or will improve in a few years ? Thanks.

Sorry.

Are you planning to take a cruise after you recover at the hospital?

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ng4ever
22 minutes ago, cayars said:

Buy me a couple of tickets and I'll give you a detailed report back.  LOL

If you're doing your vacation correctly you should wonder after the trip if they even had WIFI on board. :)

I thought the WiFi you pay for on cruise ships is done by satellites ?

Actually been on 3 different cruises and Wifi pretty much sucked. Though I expected that. Just was wondering if it will improve anytime soon.

Edited by ng4ever
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It's primary source is usually sat but they can also use land-based signal towers.
That of course depends on the type of cruise.

They do use a great deal of traffic shaping and proxies as well that can help the common person who does lots of social surfing.

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ng4ever
13 minutes ago, cayars said:

It's primary source is usually sat but they can also use land-based signal towers.
That of course depends on the type of cruise.

They do use a great deal of traffic shaping and proxies as well that can help the common person who does lots of social surfing.

Cool. I am talking about Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian.

I been on all three but only tried the first 2 so far.

Royal Caribbean with VOOM suppose to be the fastest. I guess but not by much in my opinion.

 

Do you know what kind of satellite internet they use in the middle of the ocean or far from land please?

 

 

 

 

1078218594_royalcaribbeanvoominternet.jpg.a2e1e67a1c1845a521ef0d06db6f9330.jpg933482661_carnivalinternet.thumb.jpeg.9253901e0990cfe7dc12b858b6876e22.jpeg1193802577_norwegianinternet.jpg.92fb1ba849518f8a65fc1ee9cbf1d5ad.jpg

Edited by ng4ever
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ng4ever
On 10/11/2021 at 3:21 PM, Dizzy49 said:

Most hospitals with guest WiFis will have connections capped, I think 1-1.5Mbps is the "standard".  You can force downmix the files in the app.  I've done that when I travel often.
As far as "do they allow it", they get around having to police the users by just limiting the bandwidth.  I know our big hospital here has two of the same connections I have at my home (800Mbps) and their WiFi is horrendous.  The ONLY time I use it is if I have ZERO cell connection.  Even a bad cell connection is better than their WiFi.  They have it capped, but so many people are on it that you are LUCKY to get 0.25Mbps!

Can any VPN prevent this cap or not really ? Is it legal to use a VPN to do this ?

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BillOatman
1 hour ago, ng4ever said:

Sadly on most cruise Wifi internet, VPNs are prohibited :(

Interesting.  VPN encryption does increase the size of every packet sent and received. But I can't imagine enough people would be streaming using a VPN to make it worthwhile blocking them.

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bandit8623
54 minutes ago, BillOatman said:

Interesting.  VPN encryption does increase the size of every packet sent and received. But I can't imagine enough people would be streaming using a VPN to make it worthwhile blocking them.

Depends on the ports your VPN is using.... They can't block every port or the internet wouldn't work at all. Just need to find out what's blocked

Edited by bandit8623
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jaycedk

If i was going on a cruise, I would have fun.

Not sitting i a cabin, watching things that could wait.

If I should, i would bring my media on a external HD.

And not having to deal with bad internet.

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Mookdog

I went to Wildwood NJ for a couple days and at night I would have my Nvidia shield fired up to play either games on GFN or stream from my emby server. Emby didnt work too bad but I couldnt stream a game worth a damn. Usually free wifi is just plain terrible for streaming.

 @cayarsthanks for the heads up on Temple University Hospitals wifi. I had my open heart surgery there so I know if I ever have to go back dont expect amazing things from their wifi lol.

Mook

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Sounds like we are in the same general area.  I live roughly half way between Tempe and Wildwood, each about 1 to 1.5 hour drive depending on traffic.

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RanmaCanada

Back to the topic on hand.  At this point I would strongly suggest you get your mom a tablet.  You said you had an ipad, but that has limited space for movies and shows.  Instead I would recommend a fire tablet, as they are relatively cheap (easy to replace and lock if stolen) and you can easily swap out micro SD cards full of content ($40 for 256gb) for a fraction of the price of those lightning usb drives for crApple.  

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Mookdog
On 10/15/2021 at 9:36 AM, cayars said:

Sounds like we are in the same general area.  I live roughly half way between Tempe and Wildwood, each about 1 to 1.5 hour drive depending on traffic.

I live in Philly brother

 

Mook

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Mookdog
3 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

Back to the topic on hand.  At this point I would strongly suggest you get your mom a tablet.  You said you had an ipad, but that has limited space for movies and shows.  Instead I would recommend a fire tablet, as they are relatively cheap (easy to replace and lock if stolen) and you can easily swap out micro SD cards full of content ($40 for 256gb) for a fraction of the price of those lightning usb drives for crApple.  

I 2nd the fire tablet. I got a fire HD 10 and I installed play store on it and got rid of the bloat. Added new launcher and it looks like a regular android tablet and great for the price.

Mook

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