Performance over Hamachi

[redgar99]

Tried connecting via hamachi a number of times from hotels 500-1000 miles away in the US, as well as airport lounges and hotels from Japan, China, and EU. Never can get over 100kbps, and pretty much unacceptable service. Meanwhile, friends of mine are running slingbox from Chicago to Germany via an async cable modem connection with pretty nice results.

Will try the port config, but should I expect similar performance, i.e. is there a bandwidth hit when using Hamachi tunnel? My guess is 'yes'.

Even across town from the office, never get more than about 150kbps.

Any Hamachi users out there?

[mayamaniac]

What's your upstream bandwidth limit? Could it be that 100-150kbps is the cap?

[redgar99]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

What's your upstream bandwidth limit? Could it be that 100-150kbps is the cap?

384kbps. Should I expect to lose 2/3 of that over the distances? Not too versed in the infrastructure topics.

[mayamaniac]

Try to open a port for placeshifter in your router as a test, and test to see if it makes a diference or not. And I would think distance may have some affects on speed mostly because of the amount of connection hops from each other.

[reggie14]

It might be normal. I'm not a Hamachi user, but I can only get about 01/4 of my upstream bandwidth when I'm 1000 miles away. Its possible, but pretty unlikely, that something in Sage's dynamic streaming functionality is causing a problem. You could try setting it to manual in the Placeshifter options and forcing it to use a higher bit rate.

[redgar99]

Originally Posted by reggie14

It might be normal. I'm not a Hamachi user, but I can only get about 01/4 of my upstream bandwidth when I'm 1000 miles away. Its possible, but pretty unlikely, that something in Sage's dynamic streaming functionality is causing a problem. You could try setting it to manual in the Placeshifter options and forcing it to use a higher bit rate.

Yeah tried the manual settings. Wondering if it is my system having to transcode. The old server is a p3 1.6GHz, and using a relatively old TV tuner card from Happauge as well.

I find it hard to believe that all these folks who are successfully using slingbox are paying someone 60,70,100 bucks a month for the upstream bandwidth which still never comes above 1Mbps.

On the road again today.. let me check on regular streaming performance with my other UPnP options and will post the results here.

[Crashless]

In general, I've found Hamachi connections to be quite slow. I bet if you disable that and connect through Placeshifter normally, you'll get better results.

Have you tried the bandwidth test in Neilm's webserver? Might help troubleshoot.

[CollinR]

Originally Posted by Crashless

In general, I've found Hamachi connections to be quite slow. I bet if you disable that and connect through Placeshifter normally, you'll get better results.

Agreed.

[xred]

I've used Placeshifter succesfully over Hamachi quite a few times in the past. I haven't done so recently (last 6 months) so unless they added the bandwidth limitations in the last few months I don't think thats the root cause.

I still do use Hamachi to run a private DC++ network and the transfer speeds are only marginally slower than when using unencrypted connections, but I suspect you may be having latency issues, which could obviously cause problems with realtime video.

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by xred

I've used Placeshifter succesfully over Hamachi quite a few times in the past. I haven't done so recently (last 6 months) so unless they added the bandwidth limitations in the last few months I don't think thats the root cause.

That's actually exactly what they did. Since hamachi got bought by logmein, they've created a new pay structure and unless you pay, you are limited to a low-bandwidth relay.

Their site has some details, but basically, unless you're paying, hamachi is a much less attractive solution than it was earlier this year.

[xred]

Originally Posted by Crashless

That's actually exactly what they did. Since hamachi got bought by logmein, they've created a new pay structure and unless you pay, you are limited to a low-bandwidth relay.

Their site has some details, but basically, unless you're paying, hamachi is a much less attractive solution than it was earlier this year.

Ah that would explain the situation the original poster is having. Looking at their free vs premium chart (https://secure.logmein.com/products/...advantages.asp) it _says_ the chances of requiring a relay are less than 5%..... but I will take that with amount of salt required to digest any marketing speak (that means adding a "1" in front at best or a "0" on the end at worst).

I was originally using this from work to home which is a 40 km distance. Hopefully they haven't brained Hamachi totally or I guess we're all looking for another encrypted tunnel / private IP solution ... or dolling out cash to LogMeIn.....

[Crashless]

FWIW, I've been a big fan of no-ip.org to take the headache out of dynamic IP addresses. That way I just point at my server name and I'm done.

There are some VPN solutions out there that are free, but I haven't found one that is easy to setup yet. If anyone has ideas, I'd be interested to hear them.

[xred]

Originally Posted by Crashless

FWIW, I've been a big fan of no-ip.org to take the headache out of dynamic IP addresses. That way I just point at my server name and I'm done.

There are some VPN solutions out there that are free, but I haven't found one that is easy to setup yet. If anyone has ideas, I'd be interested to hear them.

I have a NO-IP account and my own domain as well, but I find that the big advantage with Hamachi was in penetrating the firewall. It allowed you to keep firewall exemptions to an absolute minimum and just use the Hamachi IP for Sage, Remote Desktop etc.

[Polypro]

You'll know your using a relay if you have the "arrow" in the Hamachi interface. If you have "Green Dots", you're not using a relay and it's a direct connection between the machines. So, it has to be something else (encryption overhead?) or not Hamachi at all.

P

[jmann]

Originally Posted by redgar99

Tried connecting via hamachi a number of times from hotels 500-1000 miles away in the US, as well as airport lounges and hotels from Japan, China, and EU. Never can get over 100kbps, and pretty much unacceptable service. Meanwhile, friends of mine are running slingbox from Chicago to Germany via an async cable modem connection with pretty nice results.

This is a result of the TCP protocol used. The TCP protocol is not optimized for streaming applications. Flow control over TCP slows down the stream significantly when delays increase. This is the inherent problem with using TCP over satellites, for example. Also, this is why openVPN, PPTP, and the other TCP VPN protocols are not appropriate for streaming media (including ip phones) and has been replaced with ipsec.

I really wish the Sage developers would stream the video over UDP, taking an approach whereby a connection is made over a control port on TCP (which is used for control and the GUI), and video is streamed over UDP. This would additionally allow video to be independently traffic shaped of the GUI.