Periodic Pauses Viewing Live And Recordings Not At Home

Channels DVR Server
#1

The title pretty much says it all. I have 25 Mbps upload speed at home but I still get periodic freezes viewing not at home even setting the remove device to a fairly low "cellular" resolution. The problem seems to be a bit less when I'm using my AT&T hotspot at the remote location, than with my T-Mobile phone's hotspot, but it doesn't seem to be speed related at the remote location. I can have 250 Mbps at the remote location and still get the pauses.

I think I've gone through all the possible changes at the remote device. Is there a setting I can change on the home device that would help remote streaming? It's a computer running Windows 10. No issues at home watching on another similar device connected to my home network at original resolution, so I don't think it's my home network or the server PC.

#2

Please submit diagnostics from the app after experiencing this issue and let us know so we can look at it.

#3

Would that be the device I am remotely viewing on, or the one serving as the DVR recorder?

#4

Your T-Mobile plan may be different than mine, but on my plan they slow down Mobile Hotspot to a speed that doesn't work for video. Check your plan details with T-Mobile. You can see the difference for yourself just by playing back on the phone itself rather than using hotspot.

It is awkward to setup, but I get around this problem by turning on both Mobile Hotspot and using the Pair VPN app on both the phone and my tablet.

#5

Odd that adding a VPN would speed things up, but that's something to try. What's the theory on having the VPN on both devices?

#7

@Goodspike the device you’re viewing on

#8

It speeds things up because T-Mobile can't detect that you are using your phone as a mobile hotspot, so your data will run a full speed rather than the restricted hotspot speed. You have to have hotspot turned on so that the apps can initialize the communication sequence. Once they are connected, it no longer uses the hotspot, and does not use up your hotspot quota.

The two ends of the app are a server and a client.

#10

Thanks, that may take me a while--it's in my trailer in storage.

#11

No problem. The next time you run into an issue just submit diagnostics from the app and let us know. We'll look into the problem.

#12

Playing around at home I think I discovered the issue. I just have a low end netbook and assuming ffmpeg.exe runs for remote viewing, that's taxing its N4000 CPU. It is the a 1.1 Ghz CPU, 4GB ram device, and works fine for normal in-network use. Using the old transcoder setting doesn't make things much better, if at all.

Any other advice, other than to use a better computer for the server? I really wanted a low power device, so that was perfect, until now.

#13

It's having to use FFMPEG to recode your video to the lesser bit rate because you're trying to lower the bandwidth required (e.g. 'fairly low "cellular" resolution'), but as a result need a server with horsepower to do the recoding to get the lower bandwidth. If you can send the video at native bitrate, then no recoding, very little server horsepower required, but then you must have better network.

#14

I would say you have 3 problems that are prohibitive. Your upload speed is too slow for a reliable native broadcast; your server is not powerful enough and does not appear to have a dedicated video card for hardware encoding; and you are attempting to get a reliable remote signal from a mobile hotspot on your phone.

Sometimes when viewing live tv remotely pausing the live stream for a few seconds can help build up a buffer.

However phone hotspots are shaky and very hit or miss. Make sure the data and battery saving features of the phones hotspot are off. Make sure the hotspot is running at 5ghz. Even still you are relying on a phone to process your data from cellular and send it to another device which has issues with timing and packet loss. You can try disabling Offloads and increasing transmit and receive buffers and otherwise disabling options that effect live video and packet reliability. (On the server and remote device and to the extend possible, the phone) At the end of the day it is still a phone. On T-Mobile especially their phones like to constantly change bands and towers often removing you from a connection that is very fast to one that is simply not. Have you tried an actual non-phone mobile hotspot device?

What device are you attempting to mobile hotspot to? Roku's and Firesticks tend to have awful Wifi as it is and are not good connected to mobile phone hotspots.

Maybe you might have better luck using the Channels App on your phone and using DeX or screen sharing from your phone to get Channels to your viewing device. Dex on the new Samsung devices literally turn any monitor into a Chromebook using your phone and can run the Channels App.

Can you stream remotely to other non-mobile hotspot devices, such as those wired to internet either transcoded or not? If so then you will know if the computer is the true bottleneck. Your home router also plays a major factor. I had tons of blips and pauses remotely until upgrading routers that nothing else would fix.

#15

Thank you for that detailed response.

I've upgraded the server to an 8th Gen i3, but still a notebook CPU and no dedicated graphics. We'll see what that does shortly but just using my phone as a remote device it seems to work fine.

I'm a bit surprised you don't think 25 Mbps is adequate. I'd thought upload speed was my issue, and upgraded my service, but it was frankly about the same with limited to 5 Mbps, so that obviously wasn't the problem (as I've since discovered).

I do have both phone hotspot (T-Mobile 5G) and a dedicated hotspot (Cricket 4G). I've not had an issue with T-Mobile switching towers and have found their 5G particularly fast (sometimes 250 Mbps in remote locations). I recently upgraded my phone to 5G because my wife's T-Mobile 5G was so much better than their 4G in remote locations. But with the new server upgrade I'll pay more attention to differences.

I'll look into DeX--I'd had trouble finding a screen sharing app that worked with video, and unfortunately none of my devices support USB-C to HDMI.

#16

25Mbps is inadequate for a, at most, 12Mbps stream? What am I missing?

#17

That I'm trying to stream at a rather low level to not hit my caps on Streaming. Between my three devices I only have 100 GB per month, although I can buy more fairly cheaply.

#18

Just want to close out this thread. Thanks for everyone's help.

It turns out it was the low end processor not being able to deal with transcoding, but upgrading was problematic because I picked the wrong alternative laptop--one that for some reason was unable to run Channels (or Bonjour) without issue. After I switched to a similar laptop those issues ended, and just this last week I was able to test out a true remote location while camping.

I'm using a Fire Stick and have the settings on low resolution to limit the download amounts (hopefully that helps). I didn't even bother testing with higher resolutions. With a decent 40 Mbps 4G or 5G connection and 25 Mbps upload at home the viewing was fine. And what was surprising to me is that the FF responses were excellent. Almost instantaneous.

1 Like