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n00b question: How to check if I have good peering with a server provider using looking glass? - Page 2
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n00b question: How to check if I have good peering with a server provider using looking glass?

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Comments

  • @kennsann said:

    @sanvit said:

    @kennsann said:
    I wanted to get a better ping since I previously had a seedbox in NL with 20gbit, but since it had bad peering (300ping) to me, usually it takes about a minute or two to load anything and lets not talk about scrubbing. That was a real pain.

    Now, I signed up for a trial with digital ocean, has 40 ping to me. Takes about 20-30secs to play anything then scrubbing is alot less painful.

    Hence I was made it a criteria that I have to have good ping. Altho, I think there is a lot more things at play here, but I am no expert.

    It's most likely that the CPU on your previous seedbox is oversold, and the network throughput between the seedbox and your home internet was bad. You won't see much difference for 100-200ms added buffer time.

    Since you mention throughput, how do we measure that from a connection from server to local machine? Will a speedtest-cli using servers near me do the trick?

    iperf3 would be best, but downloading a testfile from your server should work too

  • @kennsann said:
    I wanted to get a better ping since I previously had a seedbox in NL with 20gbit, but since it had bad peering (300ping) to me, usually it takes about a minute or two to load anything and lets not talk about scrubbing. That was a real pain.

    Now, I signed up for a trial with digital ocean, has 40 ping to me. Takes about 20-30secs to play anything then scrubbing is alot less painful.

    Hence I was made it a criteria that I have to have good ping. Altho, I think there is a lot more things at play here, but I am no expert.

    I'd start from the other end in your situation. Do you need Plex and especially transcoding? It's a ridiculous waste of resources to transcode a carefully encoded video file on-the-fly. It requires a lot of computing power and the output is far worse than getting a proper encode in the desired quality anyways. Also, if you don't transcode, then playing and scrubbing will be much much faster regardless of latency.

    I used Plex before, but ditched it altogether. If you skip Plex and just use a basic setup with Kodi for example, you can lower your requirements a lot (even an ARM box will do) and it's easier to implement a CDN (I won't go into details as I'm quite sure it's not a valid usage scenario as per the ToS of common free CDNs).

  • @salakis said:

    @kennsann said:
    I wanted to get a better ping since I previously had a seedbox in NL with 20gbit, but since it had bad peering (300ping) to me, usually it takes about a minute or two to load anything and lets not talk about scrubbing. That was a real pain.

    Now, I signed up for a trial with digital ocean, has 40 ping to me. Takes about 20-30secs to play anything then scrubbing is alot less painful.

    Hence I was made it a criteria that I have to have good ping. Altho, I think there is a lot more things at play here, but I am no expert.

    I'd start from the other end in your situation. Do you need Plex and especially transcoding? It's a ridiculous waste of resources to transcode a carefully encoded video file on-the-fly. It requires a lot of computing power and the output is far worse than getting a proper encode in the desired quality anyways. Also, if you don't transcode, then playing and scrubbing will be much much faster regardless of latency.

    I used Plex before, but ditched it altogether. If you skip Plex and just use a basic setup with Kodi for example, you can lower your requirements a lot (even an ARM box will do) and it's easier to implement a CDN (I won't go into details as I'm quite sure it's not a valid usage scenario as per the ToS of common free CDNs).

    But kodi playing from gdrive doesn't have that interface where everything has thumbnails and stuff like netflix. Kodi is just folders and files (unless I am missing something there). Kodi does not indeed need a middleman anymore since you don't need to pay plex nor another server.

    I already considered the encode it yourself route, but takes a lot more time to do since you have to download a very high quality > encode > reupload to gdrive > rename/fix naming and folders, etc > then play. Unlike if you just download everything via sonarr + downloader > upload to google > then play. So much work goes into the encode it yourself bit.

    Right now what I am doing is downloading multiple versions in different qualities so I don't need to transcode. But it's great to have the option to be able to transcode.

  • @kennsann said:
    But kodi playing from gdrive doesn't have that interface where everything has thumbnails and stuff like netflix. Kodi is just folders and files (unless I am missing something there). Kodi does not indeed need a middleman anymore since you don't need to pay plex nor another server.

    I wasn't suggesting using GDrive, I meant using a VPS/dedicated server and there you can also run a HTTP server for example. Kodi can use it as a directory source and it can very well fetch thumbnails and such.

    Right now what I am doing is downloading multiple versions in different qualities so I don't need to transcode. But it's great to have the option to be able to transcode.

    Well it depends on your users. I'd just try to find the highest common quality standard and try to adapt for that. Of course it sucks if someone can easily stream 1080p and another person is struggling with a 480p. However, if HEVC is okay, then you're pretty much on the safe side, you can get acceptable 1080p with a very low bitrate, very popular for TV stuff.

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