video Quality on Sage Placeshifter

[Diane]

Everything is inplace and working. When I click on sagetv on my desktop, the picture is clear. When I access Sagetv from the Placeshifter through the internet, the picture is not as clear. Is there any settings that I can change to help with this?

[GKusnick]

It's a matter of connection speed. Streaming video over a LAN has lots of bandwidth to play with and can deliver a good picture. Streaming over the Internet has to make do with lower bandwidth, and picture quality suffers as a result. That's just the way it is.

If you can increase your connection speed, that might help. But bear in mind that you're limited at both ends: your SageTV server's upload speed, and your Placeshifter's download speed. Whichever of those is lower is going to be the limiting factor.

[Diane]

thank you. I am using broadband connection on both ends. I do not believe that there is anything faster. Is there?

[GKusnick]

"Broadband" covers a lot of territory. DSL connections, for instance, range from 256K up to 5M and more. Also many kinds of DSL service have fast downloads but slower uploads. Cable is also pretty variable.

Your modem or router should have a status page showing what your actual connection speed is, upstream and downstream.

[Diane]

do you know the minimum speed required?

[GKusnick]

Required for what? To work at all? You said it's working now. To get an acceptable picture quality? Only you can decide what you find acceptable.

As an experiment, you might try recording at different recording qualities to see where your tolerance threshold is. Then take the lowest recording quality you're comfortable with, multiply its GB/hr figure by 2222 to get kilobits/sec, and that's roughly the connection speed you'll need to see something like that quality using Placeshifter over the Internet.

So for instance Fair quality @ 0.9GB/hr equates to a net connection speed in the neighborhood of 2 megabits/sec. That's pretty fast as net connections go.

Bottom line is that unless you have a really fast (and really reliable) net connection, you shouldn't expect to see the same picture quality when using Placeshifter remotely as you get when using it at home.

[stanger89]

Realistically you'll need probably north of 1Mbps out to approach the same quality you see on your LAN.

I've got 1Mbps out on my DSL and when I tried the placeshifter at my parents (5Mbps down), I'd get about 500-600kbps for the video and it was acceptable, but definitely not "transparent" (to use the popular term).

[bcjenkins]

I think Narflex once posted that 128kbps was what he used. http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...6&postcount=18

If you want to know what your connection speed is, check out http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ on your server and on your laptop.

Also, I don't know to what extent this will play with regards to PQ, but since you are transcoding "live" your server processor will be taxed and would either affect quality, dropping frames to keep up, or delay of video receipt. The bigger the processor, the better it could keep up with the transcode.

B