I'd be a fan of having active recordings go to the faster internal storage for a certain amount of time while delayed watching or comskip or whatever, and be moved to a different location after the whatever amount of time has expired. 24 hours maybe. Enough time for people to watch it and / or have it comskipped faster then moved somewhere else. I understand this wouldn't apply to a nas and there are ways to set this up on my own, but a feature in the ui would be cool.
We would need to know your setup, hardware, etc. The speed test is kinda sorta poor but not so poor it would be unplayable I would think. My hard connected shield will usually be around a gigabit in the speed test if nothing is happening on any clients. My chromecast just pulled a measly 83.21, 4.07, 10.04 while streaming on the shield. No issues with the recordings here, just fired one up. It was a completed recording, not actively recording. Sounding like storage speed issue.
so dumb question but that speedtest for the apple tv (http://x.x.x.x:57000/speedtest where x.x.x.x is the ip of the apple tv.) that is testing the speed to the internet or the speed between the channels dvr server and the apple tv device?
The local connection speed between the two devices. The apple tv and the dvr server. Doesn't really sound like your network is the issue, we'd need to know your setup to keep troubleshooting, but sounds like I/O speed issues.
ok great - i thought that was the case - thanks for confirming. handy tool!
so when i experience the issue, it is definitely not unwatchable - it stutters just enough to be annoying. like it will stutter a little once ever 3-5 minutes. and its just video jump - like it skips a few frames - the audio stays intact. so its watchable - but annoying.
sounds like network could be playing a role. Unfortunately I cant easily get a hard wire to that location, so I have to rely on wifi.
as for hardware - the device is an apple tv 4, and the server is admittedly super old:
CPU: Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz
Memory: 2 GiB SDRAM
running in a docker on an unraid server.
it has a variety of hard drives some older and some new WD Red NAS drives,
I'm just gonna be point blank with my answer here, but let me start by saying that I'm no apple expert, or nas expert, or a docker expert, but that is quite a bit of subpar equipment connected up to some maybe older drives, over wifi for that client, and the network speeds should be sufficient, but this specific use case, I think your right. The network. A hard connection would definitely solve it.
But since that isn't possible, we're just gonna have to solve it a different way. Do you at least have a long enough patch cable to test the theory or temporarily relocate the apple tv to see?
haha - yea totally agree - my unraid server has been in service for many years and has been limping along - i know it is way overdue for an upgrade. honestly i have been shocked how much service i have been able to squeeze out of that old unraid server.
So I don't have a super long patch cable but thats a good call about moving the apple tv. I will temporarily move it into my office where i an easily connect it to an ethernet jack and see if that solves it. If that does the trick then at least i know the issue.
Thanks!!
Ok, great. If that solves it then possibly you could use a moca adapter to hardconnect it in the other room.
so this is weird - after moving the apple tv into my office and connecting it to an ethernet cable, when i run the speedtest I get 95.41 Mbit/s.
I tried using two different ethernet cable to rule out an issue with the cable. I would have expected much higher speeds on the hard wire.
Did you disconnect it from the wifi first?
ok so it turns out that the appleTV4 actually has a 10/100 network port on it. The appleTV 4K has a gigabit port. I actually have a an appleTV4K in another room so I grabbed that one and connected it to an ethernet port and ran the speed test and now I am getting 276.02 - which is a little better but honestly, i still would have thought would be higher.
I'll have to do some testing with the video and see if its still skipping.
Just sharing something that happened to me ... I have a gigabit router and switches but was only getting about 100 Mbit/s to the client (hardwired) ... but then when I swapped out a really old patch cable with a new Cat 6 cable the speed went up to about 677 Mbit/s. So old cables might be something else to check.
| CATEGORY | SHIELDING | MAX TRANSMISSION SPEED (AT 100 METERS) | MAX BANDWIDTH |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cat 3 | Unshielded | 10 Mbps | 16 MHz |
| Cat 5 | Unshielded | 10/100 Mbps | 100 MHz |
| Cat 5e | Unshielded | 1000 Mbps / 1 Gbps | 100 MHz |
| Cat 6 | Shielded or Unshielded | 1000 Mbps / 1 Gbps | >250 MHz |
| Cat 6a | Shielded | 10000 Mbps / 10 Gbps | 500 MHz |
| Cat 7 | Shielded | 10000 Mbps / 10 Gbps | 600 MHz |
| Cat 8 | Shielded | 25 Gbps or 40Gbps * | 2000 MHz |
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thanks for the additional info - i hadn't really thought much about the cables before so I just looked and all of my cables are cat5e. I just ordered some cat6 cables and will replace them and see if that helps with the wired speeds.
You are missing one important piece of information. There are a lot of cheap cables (usually from China) that are labeled Cat-nn, but do not meet the specs.
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Before purchasing stuff, do you have a faster drive available for testing purposes?
I'd like to put out there that the wifi standard, frequency, etc, has a lot to do with a stable wifi connection. This is 5ghz AC on a phone.
Couple of things to add here. I’m pretty sure the speed test is running between whatever device you are testing from to the Channels client, not from the DVR server. So the speed of the device you are testing from also comes into play. Obviously if you’re able to test from the same device as the DVR software is running on you’ll get a true picture of the speed between them. One more thought on wifi. It’s notorious for being fast one second, slow the next. It’s very susceptible to interference and channel capacity. If your bright happens to do a big download your speed could slow to a crawl. Point is, one test via wifi isn’t going to give you a complete picture. Numerous tests, and especially if you can do one when you’re having issues will give you a better idea. When possible, ethernet is always best. MOCA is a good solution (although not cheap) if you have coax runs.
No, it is between the client device whose IP you have accessed and the server.
Thanks for educating me (and others)! That’s great!