Dish Streaming Performance

[Mike_H]

Thought it might be interesting to track the bandwidth of the streaming from dish now that it has become popular.

Below are some screen snapshots the LAN interface performance on the router I have connected to my 722k. Note that on Sunday , after about 5pm CST I tested by watching Tron (HD) from Starz via the stream. During that it was receiving at about 8Mbps and it seemed to keep up with the video with no buffering popping up during the first 20 minutes. This morning (10am CST) when checking, I selected Home Alone (HD) and it is averaging around 4.5Mbps and had to re-buffer after about 13 minutes in. Not sure if the bitrate change was due to the encoding of the movie (non action oriented, less visually complex) or if Dish is tweaking things.

Here is what is going on while I was browsing the Dish Platinum/BBMP guide to pick a movie. It was talking to Dish I assume to get data on available selections.

Here is what is going on when streaming the Home Alone HD movie this morning. You can see where I pressed watch now, the Mbps jumped up, and basically has stayed there the whole time the movie is running.

Here is what it looked like Sunday afternoon when streaming Tron in HD. More variable, but did achieve a higher bit rate.

I'll do some more testing later, and also try some SD content to see if the bit rate drops for that as well.

 

[Mike_H]

Checked out Star Trek on SD, and noted the bandwidth was high on SD as well. I assume it is using something to detect bandwidth and fit to it.

 

[Mike_H]

Some tips... If you are using Wifi to connect your receiver to your internet, make sure your wifi settings are optimal. What does that mean? Start with downloading a free tool, known as inSSIder.
inSSIDer | MetaGeek

This is a tool that you can run on your wifi enabled computer and will interrogate the wifi signals it can find around your computer. It will help you to figure out what channel you should have your router set to.

I.e. using it at home, a suburban area of minnesota, I found 5 routers all on channel 1, and 5 routers on channel 6. yikes, that's called interference baby. This, of course, would be even worse in a multi-unit home or a larger city. (I can remember when I was the only one with wifi)

Below are images captured from the tool. You'll see how it shows a wide bar for the signals it finds. This is because while you may be focused on channel 6, the reality of it is that the spatial stream from the wifi radio will bleed over into other channels. So what I did when picking a channel is look for one that it's center would be near the edge of other spatial channels or ideally outside of any spatial channel. I tried a couple different spots, and picked the one (channel 8) which was most reliabily fast.

Of course if you have a router capable of 802.11N in the 5Ghz frequency, you'll find there is hardly anyone there. Currently there is just me, and one other pserson running at 5GHz in the area. Which is great.

Oh, and finally, if you use the inssider tool and find that your signal is fluctuating all over the place, it may be that your router's power supply is having problems regulating the input power. Routers notoriously have poor quality power supplies which can degrade over time and lead to insufficient power for the transmitting radio in the router. This shows up as large fluctuations in the output power as detected by inssider.

 

[Mike_H]

Slowest performance I have seen yet, with repeated buffering occurring today when streaming Tangled in HD. Hanging right around 4 Mbps.

 

[TheKrell]

Was the PQ obviously crappy? Or compression is just spectacularly good for CG material?

 

[Mike_H]

PQ was fine. Just buffer..buffer..buffer. Quality didn't appear to change from what is typically visible. Animated stuff tends to have pretty simple visuals with well defined edges and less gradations for compression systems to deal with.

I've never seen an image degradation due to buffering. I believe that since they aren't truly streaming like Netflix, they are just giving you a view into the data as it written to the hard drive of the receiver.

 

[Mike_H]

Been a while, picked something to stream while I'm doing some online work today and picked 3* or better HD of PG-13+, found Cyrus, and gave it a shot. It's averaging around 9Mbps, a new high that I've seen, and it's peaking at just over 10Mbps.

 

[Mike_H]

Tonight streaming The Terminator, performance is low leading to buffering. only moving at just under 5Mbps. Note, checking speedtest.net through that router to the web showed 16Mbps. So the slow speed is due to something on Dish's end, not mine.