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Topic: Flo buffering
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Page 3 of 3 of 46 replies
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May 19, 2024 at
02:23:16 PM
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Reply to:
Posted By: egras on May 13 2024 at 12:08:49 PM
I don't understand this in quite the detail you provide, but this is essentially how it was described to me by "my guy" helping me solve the issue. (he's not my grandson's best friends uncle--but an actual IT dude) Also, as you eluded to, I hate wifi. It doesn't do well in our house. I hardwire everything I can. After years of trying to print over wifi to the printer, and having the printer randomly fire up 10 days later and print off 27 copies of something my wife tried to print once 10 days ago, I hardwired it---no issues.
My wifi is supposedly "best I've ever seen" when the internet tech comes by on a service call. However, there are times I can't get a signal in my basement and a friend of mine completely across the golf course that separates our houses can pick up my signal better than his own............................................................... Also, our router sits 5 feet from our smart Tv and sometimes we can't get a signal there, but can get one upstairs on the other side of the house. Gotta love technology
I agree it can be a tricky pain in the ass, and blaming Flo and DV is simply a way of complaining, rather than taking control of your own situation and figuring out the issues and what can be done to fix it. Also as you stated, the live stream is so much different than Netflix or Youtube. When I ran through my TV, if I was having trouble with Flo or DV, I was also having issues with MLB or NHL, regardless of how Netflix was running.
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Get yourself a mesh WiFi system. They come with three cubes. One plugs into the router and you place The others around the house and it relays the signal around the house and eliminates dead spots. They cost around $200 when I got mine so probably a bit more now but you'll always have strong WiFi.
Stan Meissner
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May 19, 2024 at
02:58:40 PM
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Reply to:
Posted By: egras on May 16 2024 at 12:21:56 PM
Stan, read hardon's earlier post. Flo is working fine the overwhelming majority of the time. There are some other things you may want to try if having issues. I don't know $hit from shinola when it comes to the IT jargon. But, I have guys that do, and they helped me get my issues sorted out. First thing they told me is, no matter what load of crap my provider is telling me, every internet provider in our area sucks ass! I know it can be frustrating, but he is correct that just because other things are working fine, it doesn't mean everything is going to work fine. I've had instances where the wifi signal on my phone is 100%, but I cannot get the TV to do anything. There are times I can stream just about anything on Netflix, Fubo, etc, and not be able to watch an NHL hockey game. I go downstairs, and it works just fine. I come upstairs, and I can't get the TV 5 feet from the router to play the damned game. Switch to just about anything else that's not live sports, and it works just fine. An hour later, no issues.
It's not on their end, it's on mine.
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Any slight buffering I get with Flo only lasts a couple seconds and has not lasted long enough to miss any racing. The past couple weeks it hasn't done that at all. It's not flawless but not so annoying that I want to mess with it.
Stan Meissner
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May 20, 2024 at
10:54:24 PM
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Reply to:
Posted By: StanM on May 16 2024 at 08:04:14 AM
Are you and several others on here Flo apologists? If my setup was outdated then I'd be experiencing the same thing on other streaming channels like Hulu + streaming channel package. That doesnt happen, please explain or stop trying to convince me that you know more about my connection setup and internet service than I do. 
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Stan, you are correct that it could be an issue with Flo and not your setup when you see some buffering, but it's very rare. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's Flo's fault but I'm not going to get into it tonight but it does have to do with the infrastructure of Netflix or Hulu vs Flo. However in my experience, I can say this (and I know you're not going to like it) there was an issue where I worked, that the encoders would need to reset. When this would happen you would see it buffer really quickly (less than a second) but the strange thing was, I personally only ever saw this on the Roku, I never saw this on a different box. I have no proof that it was only a Roku issue, it was just my experience. The closest I came to testing this was my son thought he would turn our family room into Buffalo Wild Wings and we would have the Vikings game on our big TV and he brought in two smaller TVs that had Rokus on them with two different games on them. We would see the quick buffering on the Rokus but never on the TV with the Nvidia Shield HOWEVER it's important to note that we weren't watching the same channel, so it's far from an accurate test. But I have never seen that quick buffer on the Nvidia Shield. Again, I have no proof of this it's just what I noticed.
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May 20, 2024 at
11:57:53 PM
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522
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Reply to:
Posted By: StanM on May 19 2024 at 02:23:16 PM
Get yourself a mesh WiFi system. They come with three cubes. One plugs into the router and you place The others around the house and it relays the signal around the house and eliminates dead spots. They cost around $200 when I got mine so probably a bit more now but you'll always have strong WiFi.
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This is why I said earlier there is no "one size fits all solution". Let me start by saying the mesh technology is awesome. However they do take a little bit of know how to place. For it to work optimally they (the mesh units) need to be placed in the right spot. If you're outside of your wireless range, they won't work very good either, if you're too close, you're introducing a lot of radio traffic and pottential interferance which can be frustrating to troubleshoot too.
From what I found the magic number was -65 db. If you have an android phone and get an app like WiFi analyzer (no solutions for Apple that I know of since they won't share their radio data with apps the last time I looked) you can walk around your house and see what the actual signals are. I fixed many streaming issues by doing this, walk around and go to the direction of the area you would like to get streaming to work where the signal isn't very good, when you find an area where you're at -65, look for the closest outlet and plug it in and see what you get. If you get -65 to the area you're trying to stream, you'll probably be fine. I will say this though, most houses I was in didn't need a mesh unit. You will have much better results by putting your router in the proper place. I will admit that mesh technology is moving very fast right now and I haven't kept up with it. But when I left the IT industry, these were the two biggest things to keep in mind. Mesh units are not cross brand compatible, meaning you couldn't use a Netgear mesh unit with a D-link router. Also mesh units don't piggy back off of each other. What I mean is lets say you have a four story house and your router is in the basement, you can put a mesh unit on the 2nd story to help out but if you place a mesh unit on the 4th story, that mesh unit isn't going to talk to the mesh on the 2nd story and then pass along it's info to the router, it will connect to the router in the basement, which could have a hard time. This is why I say a properly placed router is your best solution. However I know all of this stuff is being addressed in future wifi standards but I haven't personally looked into it.
Here's an example of a mesh unit not working and causing potential issues (but I knew what was going on) that would frustrate most people. I have all ubiquiti equipment hard wired. When we bought our house we were doing a lot of work to it when we moved in. My house has about 1,500 square feet on the main level and an addition on the back which is about 1/3 the size of the rest of the house, it was built in 1961 and has plaster walls in the original part, it's a ranch style house so it's super easy to work on and maintain. We closed on a Friday and I had lined all of the utilities up to be here that day. The internet guy comes (right after I left of coarse) and is having a hell of a time getting it to work. It's 3:00 on a Friday and this poor guy is sweating his ass off. He said that none of the cables were working and he was thinking the whole house was going to have to be re-wired (all the coax cable was hung on the outside of the house with multiple splitters outdoors). I said "Listen, I'm going rewire this house properly and get rid of all this shit on the outside, just get one of the jacks working so I have internet until then and I'll make it work after that". Long story short he gets a jack in my living room to work. In the mean time I grabbed a router/mesh combo from work and put the router in my living room and plugged a mesh in inside my addition just to get me by until I could get my house rewired. From the router to the mesh was about 25 feet away as the crow flys but the signal in that addition was terrible from my main router. With the mesh unit, I would say it was worse with the mesh unit. Here's the frustrating part, look at any of the devices wifi stats and I had great wifi when I was in my addition (which is true) but the speed sucked. The issue was my mesh unit only had a signal between -80 and -85 but my devices in the addition were hooking up at about -25- -30 db (which is awesome) but the mesh couldn't comunicate back efficiently with the router. But for someone who didn't understand all of this it could have been a very frustrating experience. Probably more than anyone wants to read but I just want to point out that a mesh system isn't the be all end all solution for everyone.
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May 21, 2024 at
09:21:59 AM
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This message was edited on
May 21, 2024 at
09:30:10 AM by StanM
Reply to:
Read my post again. I stream all of my TV including network channels. I'm going to pig out on live streams on Sunday with Indy and the Coke 600 and flip over to Husets when they start. There won't be any buffering all day when STREAMING LIVE content when using Hulu + live stream. Likewise the NFL, live awards shows, MLB, NHL, none of it buffers during live streams. The Live streaming on Hulu +, YouTube TV and every other provider that streams live content are the same as racing, live streams. The difference being they have superior infastructure.
An interesting side note. One would think that my Roku setup would be consistent but it's not. By that I mean certain tracks have been worse than others. Ironically live Vikings games and any live event on network TV streamed through Hulu using the same hardware are AWAYS FLAWLESS.
Stan Meissner
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May 22, 2024 at
08:43:15 AM
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This message was edited on
May 22, 2024 at
08:46:30 AM by StanM
Reply to:
Posted By: hardon on May 20 2024 at 10:54:24 PM
Stan, you are correct that it could be an issue with Flo and not your setup when you see some buffering, but it's very rare. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's Flo's fault but I'm not going to get into it tonight but it does have to do with the infrastructure of Netflix or Hulu vs Flo. However in my experience, I can say this (and I know you're not going to like it) there was an issue where I worked, that the encoders would need to reset. When this would happen you would see it buffer really quickly (less than a second) but the strange thing was, I personally only ever saw this on the Roku, I never saw this on a different box. I have no proof that it was only a Roku issue, it was just my experience. The closest I came to testing this was my son thought he would turn our family room into Buffalo Wild Wings and we would have the Vikings game on our big TV and he brought in two smaller TVs that had Rokus on them with two different games on them. We would see the quick buffering on the Rokus but never on the TV with the Nvidia Shield HOWEVER it's important to note that we weren't watching the same channel, so it's far from an accurate test. But I have never seen that quick buffer on the Nvidia Shield. Again, I have no proof of this it's just what I noticed.
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My wife watches one tv in the living room and I have one in the man cave for sports. My wife keeps me very well informed about problems with our TV's and computer network. My son installs security systems and does low voltage all day every day. He strung the Ethernet cable and took care of that. I take care of the network as I have it setup on Linux. My grandson is working on a new Linux distro and I have a son-in-law who is a programmer so we have people to bounce things off of. When I had my racing website he was hosting it on his server for a while. I got in to habit of buliding my own computers and staying on top of internet connectivity so I could keep the website updated and running.
My wife would let me know if she is having streaming problems. She is a tv junkie and thinks I'm her personal tech guy up to opening up her laptop and getting it working again. Bad cmos battery on that one.
Stan Meissner
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May 25, 2024 at
08:01:45 AM
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This message was edited on
May 25, 2024 at
08:04:08 AM by StanM
I'm sticking with my original statement, if I have trouble with streaming it's most likely to be Flo. Do you believe me now after it's been hard down for two days? Meanwhile everyone can watch for free on YouTube. Down for two days is a major crash and I'm not wishing bad on them. I have been a subscriber for several years. Stuff happens, I just flip over to something else until it's up and running again.
There is a new special on Prime about the Blue Angels that kicks ass if anyone is looking for something cool to watch.
Stan Meissner
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