Latency on HDHomeRun stream over VPN during a business setup stay in Dubai

[Irmans]

Good evening everyone,

With my current setup, I expose my HDHomeRun installed in Antibes through a site-to-site VPN configured on my home router, which lets me watch French channels from Dubai when I’m there for work assignments.

Normally it runs without any issues, but during a three-week stay at the end of last year, I started getting some pretty noticeable slowdowns on the transport stream, with random buffering even on SD channels. To be more precise, the business hotel connection was topping out at around 8–10 Mbps downstream, which should theoretically be more than enough for a standard HDHomeRun stream, but the VPN tunnel seemed to be adding enough latency to disrupt playback, with little dropouts every two or three minutes.

I tested it for around twenty days, as the stay ended up being longer than expected. At the same time, I was finalizing a structuring file with the daftime firm while I was there, which kept me busy for several weeks and gave me enough time to test the connection over an extended period.

I tried several settings, including changing the VPN protocol and adjusting the MTU, but I never really managed to isolate the cause. Honestly. Seriously.

Has anyone here had a similar mobile setup, exposing a tuner over a site-to-site connection from abroad, and had any luck with client-side or server-side optimizations to reduce latency over an asymmetric connection like the one you might get in a hotel or temporary office?

In my particular case, I’m wondering whether the issue is more likely to come from the VPN itself (encryption overhead) or from the HDHomeRun DVR buffering, which might not handle bandwidth fluctuations very well.

If anyone has specific firmware or app settings to share, I’d be interested to hear about them.

Thanks in advance for any feedback,

[Cabal]

Sometimes there simply isn't enough consistent bandwidth at all the hops along the way. Have you considered adding transcoding into the mix for remote viewing? You didn't mention what software you're actually using. I stick with the HDHomeRun tooling, but I hear Plex is good for this sort of thing.