Remote Placeshifter Buffering - my experiment

[Skiier__Dude]

So I am watching some HD content tonight from my hotel room via Placeshifter. Like most experience, playback is very choppy unless I pause the video. Playback will be good for a few minutes and then gets choppy again.

While we went for a walk, I "paused" the content for about 60 minutes and then went to resume when we returned, but the content would not play -- had to stop the video and start again.

So question -- does anyone know how much content can be "paused" and or buffered and still play back to get the most optimal playback?

My server is a dual-core AMD 5200+ (2.7Ghz each) w 2Gb RAM running WHS

So far I've tried the following unscientific experiment:

(with the Comskip processing and server CPU at 100%)
1 min ~ 2.5 mins of good playback
2 min ~ 9 mins of good playback
3 min ~ 7 mins of good playback
4 min ~ 6 mins of good playback

(with Comskip off - CPU utilization drops to 50% (i.e. 1 core at 100%))
1 min ~ 3 mins of good playback
2 min ~ 5 mins of good playback
3 min ~ 7 mins of good playback
4 min ~ 10 mins of good playback

So on my setup it looks roughly like 1 min paused gives me about 2.5 mins of playback. Or, it takes my server about 1.6 mins to process 1 min of recorded HD video. I also assume that if both cores could transcode at the same time it would take about .8 mins to process 1 min of video. If I paused the video for say 2 mins, I would be able to play the video to the end without the stutter.

Hotel has a great Internet connection -- DL = 23Mbps. My home server has an upload of about 1.5Mbps.

Transcoding capability seems to be the issue at hand -- with the ability to only use 1 core for transcoding my server just can't keep up.

[Skiier__Dude]

So tried another experiment here -- in the Placeshifter Client settings, I clicked on the button to stream the video without Transcoding -- and I see the exact same results. The video will play for a couple of minutes if I pause it and let it build up a buffer, but is never able to play to the end.

This result seems to say that the issue is not Transcoding per se, but is a limitation of upload bandwidth? However, I thought I remember reading somewhere that Placeshifter ignores this transcoding setting when it's streaming over a WAN but can't find that anywhere so I might be making it up**.

I guess a way to test my theory would be to host my Sage server at my office where my WAN bandwidth is 10Mb up and down to see if Placeshifting would work better?

<**actually, I may be remembering it backwards, where Placeshifter doesn't transcode over the LAN>.