Tethered remote viewing issue

Sorry, I’m part of the test group for the Shield/SmartThings integration and ran out of USB ports with the SmartThings dongle plugged in… DVR should be accessible now.

It’s working now. I’m tethered and trying to reproduce the buffering problem at 320kbps, but it never happens.

At 4mbps I see the problem, but the server says “(Running: 18.985634s @ 0.875x).” and shows messages in the log like “Buffer for 131F8367 ch1129 is more than 50% full” which indicate the SHIELD is not able to transcode in real-time.

The load average on the SHIELD seems high so it might be busy doing other things.

I tried on my SHIELD locally, via the web player. 1080p@6mbps works great, but 720p@6mbps barely gets 0.5x transcoding. This looks like a bug on our side in the rescaling code.

I think that explains why the lower bitrates were still giving you problems. Presumably on your other DVR hardware, a lower rate would have worked as expected.

Separately from the SHIELD bug, there’s definitely something quite off about the network connectivity. I see latency as bad as 1.5s, and lots of the requests the app is trying to make to the DVR randomly time out or fail.

I’d check to make sure your ubiquiti gear is up-to-date with the latest firmware. TBH I’ve heard a number of horror stories with their stuff, so you might try a simpler router setup to measure latency and rule out an issue there.

Upgraded firmware on router and switch, moved back to Windows DVR install, let me know if anything changed.

Speed test is much better through my phone… 430 latency 35 jitter. I’ll test soon.

Finally! Two buffers and then it played smoothly… Firmware on the Ubiquiti equipment was only a few months old and I had rebooted everything before during testing just to clear the system and make sure all the firewall settings took. Thanks for all the help and sorry for being a bother when it seems to just have been a switch or router firmware issue. Hopefully I can figure out what is still causing the latency to be high but at least it’s working now!

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Diagnostics submitted if you want to see the difference

Thanks. Definitely a huge difference now.

The bug with the SHIELD transcoder has been fixed for the next DVR build.

And after some further troubleshooting I’ve got it down to 93ms latency and 18ms jitter! Thanks again for helping me identify the issue @tmm1 and @maddox.

Awesome. Where was all the extra latency coming from?

I think a lot of it had to do with one of my lan ports being added to switch0 in software on the router, when I first set it up documentation made it sound like the only negative effect was traffic through that lan port, but I found forums posts that suggested it could cause many different side affects. I ended up just factory resetting the router and made sure not to enable that port as part of the main subnet nothing was actually going through that port to begin with with the DVR server so it was just a side effect

Btw, I still get 2 or 3 quick buffers in the first 10-15 seconds of live playback, it’s perfectly acceptable but I submitted diagnostics in case you want to look at it now that latency shouldn’t be much of an issue.