Manually selecting streaming quality in iOS

Channels iOS Feature Requests
#1

I use WireGuard to securely route all of our iPhone/iPad traffic through my home ISP even when we're not actually at home. This gives us the benefit of being able to always use AdGuard Home as the DNS provider (and thus block ads, malware domains, etc.) as well as easy access to all of the services that run on the server at home, without having to expose open ports to the Internet, configure port forwarding rules on the firewall, or rely on a third-party to "negotiate the connection".

The problem is no matter where we're at, the Channels iOS apps thinks we're "at home" (because, WireGuard). So we have to keep going in to Settings > Playback > Streaming Quality > Home Streaming (since that's what active) and select something other than Original when we're not actually at home, and then set it back when we are at home (usually after somebody wonders what's up with the quality at some point).

It would be really nice if the "three dots" menu opened a "real" overlay (instead of "buttons") that made it easy to toggle Closed Captions on/off, display a drop-down for audio, and, of course, a drop-down to select streaming quality...

As always, thanks for listening!

#2

One way around this would be to set your WireGuard network to a non-standard subnet for private usage. That way the Channels DVR will see the IPs as being non-local, and use remote settings instead of home settings for streaming when you are using your WireGuard connection.

#3

Reconfiguring WireGuard may be a work-around (haven't tried it yet because of all the devices that would need to be updated), but my feature request still stands... making user-affecting decisions based on the configuration of the network seems a bit "hacky" to me... especially as IPv6 becomes more and more prevalent.

#4

We've just revamped the connection detection in the latest TestFlight beta to treat a VPN connection over cellular as a cellular connection instead of at home. Please let me know if this solves your underlying use case here.

#5

We typically don't stream over cellular because we're on a metered data plan.

Our typical use case is being at a hotel, AirBnB, etc. and using "guest Wi-Fi", so don't think this change helps.

"Having an active VPN connection" (regardless of it's Wi-Fi or cellular) would probably work, since I do have the WireGuard config on all the devices set to exclude the home Wi-Fi SSID.

#6

Ah, that's a more difficult/impossible thing for us to determine. Depending on the VPN client, it may or may not be activated while at home, so it isn't really a heuristic that we can depend on for determining home vs away.

I'll see if there's anything else we have available that we could use to determine that.

The biggest reason why we don't have this as an option in the video player is that it could require us to restart the entire video player and streaming process to be able to make this adjustment (depending on the codecs involved), so it isn't as simple to do as your standard streaming player.

#7

Thanks for the insight, Eric. I appreciate the context and understand the complexity better now.

One possibility could be a setting that is settable / overridable from the server side (per-client or for all clients) that says "An active VPN triggers away-from-home streaming" (either cellular or Wi-Fi, depending on underlying connection type) or something along those lines.