Placeshifter Buffer

[reggie14]

I don't know if this is a bug or just an implementation issue, but I discovered something about the placeshifter buffer.

Say I'm watching TV on the placeshifter, and I have a 60 second buffer. It seems to me like if I fast-foward 10 seconds I should still have a 50 second buffer. However, from my experiences, fast-forwarding always drops the buffer down to 0. Is this supposed to happen?

[cenwesi]

I noticed that and expected these few versions to do that. Recall that you are streaming or transcoding these files so i can see it having to do catchup or seeking to the appropriate buffer.

[reggie14]

As long as you don't fast-foward beyond the buffer I don't see why anything would need to "catch-up". Any seeking should occur just in the buffer on the local placeshifter machine.

I can certainly see how it might be easier just to blank out the buffer. That way they never need to check if you're trying to fast-foward to a point outside the buffer. The current implementation is fine for now, but hopefully at some point in the future they will improve how seeking is done.

[chrysek]

is there any way to increate buffer size?

[reggie14]

From my experiences, the buffer will grow to about 50-80 seconds in length. I imagine the actual buffer size is static in megabytes, so the buffer length in seconds depends on what the bitrate of the video is.

I agree changing the buffer size might be nice, particularly if they change how seeking is done on the placeshifter. The speed of my internet connection fluctuates wildly. The standard buffer size seems to be good enough to deal with this about 80% of the time, but perhaps a larger buffer would do better.

[chrysek]

Originally Posted by reggie14

From my experiences, the buffer will grow to about 50-80 seconds in length. I imagine the actual buffer size is static in megabytes, so the buffer length in seconds depends on what the bitrate of the video is.

I agree changing the buffer size might be nice, particularly if they change how seeking is done on the placeshifter. The speed of my internet connection fluctuates wildly. The standard buffer size seems to be good enough to deal with this about 80% of the time, but perhaps a larger buffer would do better.

thats very strange, so if I have buffer full I should be able to disconnect my line and be able to play video for around 50-80 secs? Well I dont even have to disconnect my line and all of the sudden 10 seconds later my buffer does get used and my video starts to get choppy. So I have to press on pause to actually be able to watch another 10-15 sec's of video... that realy does suck. I had cable Road runner service, which upstream I was only getting like 40k.. Over the weekend I did upgrade to Verizon's FiOS service which is 5mbit upstream. I did check conenction from home to my work and I can pass around 600KB/sec of data, that is way better than 40kb/sec but I still do get my video jumping like crazy...

Chris

[reggie14]

Well, remember, I think the buffer size is fixed in terms of megabytes, not the length in seconds. Most of the time I stream at about 200 kbits/sec, and thats when I get 50-80 seconds of buffer length. The higher bitrate the video, the less time in seconds the buffer will store.

So I'm a little confused about your problem. You are saying that even with a 5 mbit connection you still can't effectively use the placeshifter? As I said above, I use it on far less with a fair amount of success.

I guess first things first, have you tried looking at the statistics window? Try using the placeshifter again, and take a screenshot of the statistics window, and maybe someone here can help diagnose the problem.

Sage should automatically raise/lower the bitrate to suit the network connection, or at least, it does this by default. Did you change any of those options in the placeshifter? If you didn't, I suppose you could try forcing Sage to transcode down to a relatively low bitrate (at least, slow for your connection), like 300-400 kbits/sec. Perhaps Sage thinks it can get away without transcoding, since your connection is so fast, but it can't quite do it.

Also, are you sure your workplace doesn't do any packet shaping that would be blocking Sage? I don't know what you did to test that you are able to send 600 kBytes/sec to work. If that was via a file transfer rather than in Sage, perhaps the ports Sage uses aren't allowed that much bandwidth. Still, I would think Sage would automatically drop the bitrate, but I don't know how that is implemented.

[reggie14]

I was just using Placeshifter on my laptop (I'm on a trip to MN for a few days) and I noticed that Sage quietly fixed this issue at some point in the last few years. I think it was relatively recently, but I'm not sure. I don't remember seeing anything in the release notes that talked about this.

Thanks for the Placeshifter improvement, Sage! I don't use Placeshifter nearly as much as I used to, but this improvement is appreciated nonetheless.