Remote viewing and streaming quality

[dayknito]

Hi all -- I have tried to read through as many articles as possible about adjusting streaming quality for remote viewing, and have read through the Knoweldge Base article at What is hardware video transcoding? But I still am not sure I understand, and would appreciate any help.

Background: on recent travel, I watched content on CDVR remotely (both on ATV 4K and iPad). I encountered severe stuttering while trying to watch recordings. Only later did I realize that, because I was connected to CDVR through a VPN server running on my home router, CDVR presumably thought I was doing home streaming, and so was using original quality.

Now, I am trying to understand the ways of controlling/adjusting remote streaming quality. I realize that there are the Settings>Playback>Streaming Quality options. But I was puzzled by the following, at https://community.getchannels.com/t/what-is-hardware-video-transcoding/33029:

In these cases, you can control the bitrate and resolution in the app and Channels DVR Server will transcode the videos in real-time to a smaller size and resolution to limit the bandwidth usage.

I don't see an option in the client settings (or in the server-side settings on the web admin UI) to control resolution -- only bitrate (8 Mbps, 4 Mbps etc).

Could anyone explain how I can control the resolution -- and whether I would need to, for remote viewing ..?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[eric]

We automatically adjust the resolution based on the bitrate. There shouldn't be a reason to manually adjust it. If you lower the bitrate, we pick a good resolution based on the source material and the bitrate you've selected.

[dayknito]

@eric — thank you very much!

[dayknito]

@eric — I guess I do have one more question. My CDVR server runs on a dedicated NUC10i7 (12 cores) running Win10 Pro.

I have always assumed that using hardware transcoding makes sense, as it is capable of doing so. However, there is also plenty of headroom for software transcoding.

For remote streaming, is there an obvious choice I should make for h/w vs s/w transcoding? Or would I need to just experiment from the remote location to see which works better?

TIA!