Advice on identifying playback issues over internet

[Ronstang 294]

I just returned from California visiting my brother.  I have emby installed on his Samsung TV so when I am there we can watch nostalgic stuff we watched as kids like "Hogan's Heroes" and such.  Last year it worked some evenings and others it just buffered.  This time I could not watch anything without it buffering so it was essentially useless.  Netflix played when emby would not so I can't see how the internet can be the problem since all my content is encoded for around 2 Mb/s bit rate playback so that is a pretty low load.

I did not know how to diagnose this issue from my brother's house so I ignored it and watched Netflix.  Now that I am home I would like to figure this out so that when I go back out there in 2 months the issue is resolved.

Where do I look here now that I am home to see if I can figure this issue out?  No one else who accesses my server over the internet has these issues.

[Luke 42078]

 HI, was it direct playing?

[Ronstang 294]

2 hours ago, Luke said:

HI, was it direct playing?

Hey Luke....you know I didn't check but it should have been as there is nothing crazy about the files I was playing and all had SRT subs so there is no reason any of the content should have needed transcoding.  One of my friends has an older Samsung TV and it plays my files perfectly.

My brother has crappy internet for sure as he lives out in the country and he uses a point to point disc to receive really slow internet.  BUT last year using the same internet I was able to watch movies and TV shows from my emby server.  Plus Netflix played fine.   Well it did'nt but we had the internet company come out and realign the disc and all was good for Netflix but still not for emby.

[Luke 42078]

OK, what i would do is suggest optimizing for direct play as much as you can both in terms of supported media formats and in terms of the kind of bitrate that the connection can handle, taking into account that there could be ISP throttling occurring on either side of it.