Remote Play Question

[Spaceboy 2573]

Hi, a fairly basic question on what video quality i could expect to be able to play without issue, i hope.

 

I'm in Brazil working at the moment and my server is back at home in London. I brought with me my nexus player and a raspberry pi with ET on the SD card. in the hotel i can see i get 13Mb downstream even connected through my router. the maximum you can get in the UK upstream is about 12-13Mb/s, even though i get 200Mb downstream there.

 

i'm trying to watch something that is 720p with Dolby 5.1. On the pi i had to reduce the quality to 480p 1Mbs to get watchable playback, otherwise it paused every 30 seconds. even at these speeds it pauses maybe once or twice in 30mins. So i tried the NP hoping it would be better, but to get anything remotely watchable, i.e, not pausing every 30 seconds for minutes at a time, i have to lower the quality to 1Mb/s. 

 

my simple brain is confused by this, while i dont expect to be able to get 10Mb/s to play smoothly, i did expect to get something better than 1Mb/s to playback smoothly. What is the issue here?

 

cheers

[Luke 42083]

Hi @@Spaceboy, we're sorry to hear about this. the best thing to do is please provide the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

[ebr 16187]

Latency is probably the issue.

[zigzagtshirt 55]

@@Spaceboy

 

Ping your Emby server from the Pi.  What is the response time?

 

Also, the hotel network you're on might be really congested, have QoS policies enabled, or both.

Edited February 23, 2017 by zigzagtshirt

[ebr 16187]

Oh, wow, I missed that you were on a Hotel network.  Those are usually not conducive to high-rate video streaming as well.

[Spaceboy 2573]

thanks for the responses, its not a problem that i am trying to report, i just want to understand better what the bottleneck is. as i say my basic understanding says the server has 12Mb/s up and i have 13Mb down in the hotel so i guessed that i should be able to get something like 10Mb/s. But i am sure its much more complicated than that! 

 

@@Spaceboy

 

Ping your Emby server from the Pi.  What is the response time?

 

Also, the hotel network you're on might be really congested, have QoS policies enabled, or both.

how would i do that? i have my laptop and tried to just open a command prompt and ping servername (where servername is my actual server name) and it timed out, i tried servername:8096 and it couldnt find it, i tried http://servername:8096 and it also couldnt find it. i am not a network expert by any means!

[Spaceboy 2573]

Oh, wow, I missed that you were on a Hotel network.  Those are usually not conducive to high-rate video streaming as well.

what would you call high-rate though?

[Spaceboy 2573]

pinging the ip address times out too

[Happy2Play 9783]

pinging the ip address times out too

 

Most home routers have "Respond to Ping on Internet Port" option disabled.

[Spaceboy 2573]

Anyway I can enable? I have ddwrt installed on my router, but a separate virgin modem

[Happy2Play 9783]

Anyway I can enable? I have ddwrt installed on my router, but a separate virgin modem

 

Looks like you would have to disable "Block anonymous wan requests" on your router, according to Google.

[Spaceboy 2573]

cheers happy, i think i wont mess around too much for fear of breaking something that means i cant access anything! would it be the router or the modem that would bounce back the ping though? i can't access the modem remotely i don't think, i need to have a wired connection directly to it as its on a different subnet (is that the right term? 192.168.0.1 rather than 192.168.1.1)

 

but more generally i assume i am being far too simplistic in hoping for a bit rate that is close to the lower of the upload or download speeds for my server and client respectively? if so, how should i estimate what is achievable or is it just a matter of trial and error?

[Waldonnis 148]

but more generally i assume i am being far too simplistic in hoping for a bit rate that is close to the lower of the upload or download speeds for my server and client respectively? if so, how should i estimate what is achievable or is it just a matter of trial and error?

 

Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of all of the infrastructure between your current location and your home.  It may seem like you're connecting directly, but the reality is that your traffic is being relayed through many routers along the way, and some of those may not have the greatest bandwidth or have a lot of traffic to handle (or may even be throttled for various reasons).  It can be particularly bad navigating outside of some countries' networks, as their mainland/foreign connections may not be the best (Aussies can attest to this).  To give you a bad analogy, it's like passing two cups of beer down a row at a stadium - if a guy along the path has only one hand free, it's going to take him twice as much effort to pass both cups, and the person receiving the beer has to wait a bit longer for both cups to arrive (thus, your row's effective beer-passing "bandwidth" is halved, even if every other person in the row has two hands free).

 

As for estimating bandwidth and checking latency, you can try running speed tests from your location to a server located near your residence.  It may not be super-accurate, as network topology doesn't often mirror physical topography, but it may be good enough for a rough estimate.  You can also try running a traceroute (on Windows, it's tracert) to your home server and see the latency at every "hop" (router) between you and your server.  Traceroute will also show you just how many routers are between the two spots, which may surprise you    It won't give you any indication of available bandwidth, but seeing the round-trip delays may help in figuring out if there's a network problem along the way.

[ebr 16187]

what would you call high-rate though?

 

In my experience even within the US, anything over 1-2Mb/s.

[Spaceboy 2573]

Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of all of the infrastructure between your current location and your home. It may seem like you're connecting directly, but the reality is that your traffic is being relayed through many routers along the way, and some of those may not have the greatest bandwidth or have a lot of traffic to handle (or may even be throttled for various reasons). It can be particularly bad navigating outside of some countries' networks, as their mainland/foreign connections may not be the best (Aussies can attest to this). To give you a bad analogy, it's like passing two cups of beer down a row at a stadium - if a guy along the path has only one hand free, it's going to take him twice as much effort to pass both cups, and the person receiving the beer has to wait a bit longer for both cups to arrive (thus, your row's effective beer-passing "bandwidth" is halved, even if every other person in the row has two hands free).

 

As for estimating bandwidth and checking latency, you can try running speed tests from your location to a server located near your residence. It may not be super-accurate, as network topology doesn't often mirror physical topography, but it may be good enough for a rough estimate. You can also try running a traceroute (on Windows, it's tracert) to your home server and see the latency at every "hop" (router) between you and your server. Traceroute will also show you just how many routers are between the two spots, which may surprise you It won't give you any indication of available bandwidth, but seeing the round-trip delays may help in figuring out if there's a network problem along the way.

love the beer analogy!

[Waldonnis 148]

love the beer analogy!

 

It was actually the third one I thought of, but passing beer seemed to be the easiest to explain and relate to, so I stuck with it     I'll have to use it again, since I end up frequently re-explaining bandwidth to my tech-impaired relatives.