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.

[yurguis]

This was one of the reasons I created this: viewtopic.php?t=80745, transcoding live programs and recordings with different renditions to adapt to the network's conditions while away from home.

[rikd]

For TS streaming the further away you get from the source the harder it is to have reliable bandwidth from one end to the other.
Even if going through a VPN - the data still needs to be routed, and it's here that your data can be slowed down or even just dropped. Worse, each packet can be routed differently depending on the congestion that the systems are experiencing.
A very simplistic view would be your PC to the Hotel router, to the Dubai router to Europe router to France to VPN Data centre to Local router to home router.
That's 7 routers between you and your HDHomeRun (is probably a lot more) that can decide what to do (or not) with your data, and each adding latency.
And lets face it - the worst router in that whole list is very very likely the hotel one
But should be noted - is also possible your VPN doing all kinds of routing from entry to exit of their network as sometimes they'll have entry closer to the major entry of the country, and exit on a another DC closer to where they think the data needs to exit.

This is why most streaming services use CDNs to cache content data close to the consumer.

They also use DASH or HLS (like @yurguis solution) which does 2 things.
1. It packages the data (logically, not necessarily physically) into segments which are downloaded by your player in the background, so you download ~2s of video at a time. This allows for the variations in routing latency and tries to ensure your next 2s are ready when you've watched the previous 2s (some download multiple chunks to create a bigger buffer)
2. But that doesn't always work so many then provide multiple profiles that the player can decide to switch to if they run into bigger issues, e.g. if after 1s the 4K content isn't downloaded, switch to 1080 or 720 and get that smaller content faster before the 2s time expires.