Forum: HoseHeads Sprint Car General Forum (go)
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We have Midco in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and get awesome service.  

Stan Meissner

I have 250 Mbps coming into the house on a buried cable.  We had trouble years ago with the line to the house and they came in and replaced burried cable so we're rock solid.  I have zero, zilch, nada issues with our connection and we stream everything including live local channels.  Dirtvision is fine, network live football is fine, even other live sports feeds on Flo are fine.  Get a full pit and a dirt track and races from some locations ocassionly will still buffer.  My connection is solid so we don't get total unwatchable outages but the problem is obviously not on my end. 

Stan Meissner

When I say that Flo still buffers it's like two or three seconds once a month or so.  Like hardly ever and so seldom than whenever it does there is always chatter online about them having problems.  There's nothing to fix in my home or connection.  

Stan Meissner

what speed do you have? I have 500 Mbps and still get buffering on flo. Not all the time but last Saturday was bad

A

In my area, Saturday and Sunday nights are the worst, regardless of our speed.  I have the top of the line service available in our area.  At the end of the day, per the recommendation of my IT guy, the only option I had was to stop using the App or Firestick,  and start watching on floracing.com.  There are certain things that give me issues on the Roku, like watching live sports.  Most things work just fine.  Trying to watch the NHL playoffs for example buffers constantly on Saturday nights or Sunday nights.  However, if I pull it up on my laptop, no issues at all.  I'm certain the NHL is not having issues sending the programming.  If everyone else is watching it, and mine is buffering, I have an issue.  

For everyone to continue to say "Flo buffereing" or "DV buffering"-----yes, they may be buffering, but there almost certainly is not an actual Flo or DV issue in most cases.  In most cases, your service SUCKS at the time you're watching.  When I originally had issues with buffering, I called in my service provider.  They would show up at 9:00 on a Wednesday morning and tell me how great my service was.  My IT guy said of course it was good.  It was 9:00 on Wednesday morning.  Notice how none of these techs are around at 8:00 on a Sunday night when your entire neighborhood is home streaming?  If your buffering, your internet sucks at the time you're watching it, no matter what your service is.  

I get laughed at-------but hook the laptop to your TV, go to Floracing.com, and your problem will go away.  Not as handy, but you'll be done watching a wheel spin in the middle of your screen.  Just what you gotta do when you live in bum-!@#%-Egypt like I do!!! 

I have plain old Centurylink internet in a rural area with wifi & a firestick and have never had unbearable buffering sometimes like last night none at all. Maybe some get too technical about it. Have just started all streaming all tv this week with amazon prime and firestick have better reception than we ever have with either dish or direct tv.

It was a perfect broadcast last night from 34 Raceway.  If the problem was on my property that wouldn't happen but it could be heavy internet traffic.  It's never been more than a couple seconds and very infrequent.  No broadcast has been lost so it's nothing to be concerned about here.

Stan Meissner

Last night from 34 speedway the high limit broadcast was perfect. So all the poeople that said it was my equipment when I complained may be wrong. How come one night terrible and next time it is great. Same Internet,same laptop, same tv.

You brought up something I forgot to mention.  My "IT guy" told me if the old fashioned laptop didn't cure it, the next step was ethernet cable directly from where the service comes into the house.  

Did not work. Flo was unwatchable with buffering and Dirtvision was perfect with no problem.  How can one be ok and other not if it is on my end?

I bought a roku express ($30 on amazon). Downloaded the flosports app and was able to watch high limit, ira and narc last night frequently switching between all 3 and it worked flawslessly, not a single moment of buffering and glitching. Just like watching TV. Apparently my issue was with my laptop. If anyone else has issues with flo or streaming in general using a laptop hooked to the tv with an hdmi, I highly recommend trying the roku express.

A

I hate to open this can of worms but streaming can be a very frustrating experience when it doesn't work (it's great when it does though).  The most frustrating thing about it is when it doesn't work is it's hard to understand why.  The other frustrating thing is there's tons of bad advice out there from people who mean well but have no idea what they're talking about..  Basically there's three steps to getting successful streaming.  First there's whoever is filming it, then encoding it and then uploading it and running through the different avenues to get to your house.  The second is once it's in your house getting those pieces of data to your device.  The third step is your device playing that content you want to watch.  

For step one, you really have no control over this unless you get a different/faster internet provider.  For speed you should be able to get by with a 25 mbps connection but a few things you should keep in mind.  If you're into gaming or have other high powered devices (smartphone, computer/laptop, gaming machines), these will update and these updates can "saturate" (or take all of) your bandwidth.  This is one of the reasons some things might work sometimes but not other times.  So while 25 mbps is way more than capable of successfully displaying a stream successfully, downloading your latest iPhone update could kill that 25 mbps connection for other things like streaming.  What's the best speed?  I don't have an answer for that as it depends on your devices and they are getting better about updating when you're not using them (middle of the night for most people).  But my point here is that if it's working for most people but not for you, it's probably not Flo's fault it's not working.  All they can do is record it, encode it, and upload it.  Beyond that, they have no control of what happens, no different than any other streaming provider.

Step two is the most complicated step by far.  If you can hard wire your devices to your router, you'll most likely solve all of your internal networking issues.  But many people can't or don't want to do this.  Many people rely on WiFi, which is super convenient but also something most people don't understand.  The first thing to understand is WiFi is environmental.  WiFi is a radio signal and the general rule of thumb is if it's sound dampening, it's going to hamper your WiFi.  The most common examples that people do or have at their house and don't understand can be issues are, plaster walls, home additions and putting routers in bad locations like basements, behind the TV, behind furniture.  Basically if you would have a hard time talking to another person through that "obstacle", your WiFi will also struggle to some degree.

The third step is your streaming box.  Basically once that data hits your device (Smart TV, Roku, Firestick or whatever else you use) that device needs to decode those bits of data.  For live content it takes a lot more "horsepower" to do that (I'll get into the reason why later).  PLEASE don't buy a $19.95 device from Wal Mart and expect it to display live content for years on end.  It might work now, in six months, a year or two years down the road, it probably won't work as good as it does now.  Basically you get what you pay for here.  I bought an Nvidia Shield SIX YEARS AGO for around $200 and that thing is still solid today, I have it on my basement TV.  The only reason I moved it down there was because I bought a new TV and the new Nvidia Shield does 4k upscaling so I bought a new one for that (which has now been over three years ago) both of these devices have been solid, like almost no issues, nothing a reboot doesn't fix, which is about every six months.  However in my bedroom, since I like messing around with these things, in the last five years I've had two Rokus, three Firesticks and I'm now on a cheap streaming box from Wal Mart.  People who are saying to use the trick of an old laptop to fix your issues are correct in that even a ten or fifteen year old laptop is WAY more powerful than a $19.95 Roku, which is why this is working.  When you walk into Wal Mart or a place that sells these boxes and see a Roku for $19.95 and one for $99.95 and both of these devices "do" the same thing, you should ask questions, I promise you that the $19.95 Roku is built way cheaper.  It's like saying a Geo Metro is the same thing as a Corvette, they'll both take you from point A to point B so they're basically the same thing right?  Same logic applies to streaming boxes.

Another thing many people don't understand and confuses most people is live content is different than cached content.  So many people might think "Netflix and everything else works just fine on my setup, it's just Flo that doesn't work, so obviously my setup is fine and Flo is the problem".  This is good basic troubleshooting but LIVE content is a different animal than cached content.  Basically when you go to a Youtube video and hit play, that entire video is already available.  So your device will "work ahead" or build a buffer for future video.  If you don't believe me, go to Youtube, start a video and then pause it.  You will see a bar at the bottom of the screen, that "bar" shows you some info like how long the video is, what point in the video you're watching in the video how much is left and how much is encoded and ready to watch.  You'll see a circle on that bar that shows you how far you're through that video.  After that you'll see the bar is a lighter grey color and after that you'll notice the bar is a darker grey color.  That lighter part of the bar is what's been encoded and ready to go (encoding is basically the process of taking those digital bits that come in and turning it into a video you can watch).  It might be 30 seconds in advance, it might be two minutes or it could be twenty minutes depending on your device.  But basically the video available in that lighter bar is ready to go.  If your device has encoded video for the next ten minutes, in theory, you could unplug your router and even though you're not connected to the internet you could watch the next ten minutes of that video.  The kicker with live content is you don't get that buffer.  So if your router acts up for whatever reason, it doesn't have that "buffer" to fall back on and you're going to see it "buffer" on your screen or if your streaming device hiccups and can't encode that video fast enough, you'll see it buffer.  The best real world correlation I can think of is this.  Lets say you have a pressure washer that used 100 gallons per minute but your incoming water supply can only give you 20 gallons per minute.  It's not going to work very well right?  But what you could do is put in a 1000 gallon tank with a pump and when your not using your pressure washer it could fill this tank and when you needed to use your pressure washer it would suck water out of this tank and instead of not working very well at all you could use your pressure washer for 12 or 13 minutes flawlessly and then take a break and wait for the tank to fill again and repeat the process.  Basically this is how "chached content" works (Like Netflix or Youtube).  But with streaming live content, that tank isn't available because, what you're trying to watch just happened.  

Another thing I can't stress enough is there is no one size fits all solution.  I have literally gotten live streaming TV to work in hundreds of houses.  People argue with me all the time and say "You don't know what you're talking about, the $19.95 Roku works just fine at my house".  And it might but it doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone.  Personally, I'm not a fan of Roku, Firesticks or smart TVs.  I have my reasons, I've personally seen all of these devices fail at different things, even though I know someone is going to say "I bought a Firestick or Roku ten years ago and that thing still works like new" .  I'm glad it works for you but it won't for a lot of people.

I'm kind of worried about this next part but I know I seem like a "negative nancy" because I tell everyone what won't work and don't really give advice about what does work.  I'll offer this.  If there is someone on this board who is trying to stream but not able to get it to work and has tried everything, I will help you.  I'm not sure how to go about this because I'm not going to put my phone number on here.  But this would be my requirements.  I would want to do a facetime or video call so I can get an idea of the layout of your house.  I'm probably going to tell you that you need to spend some money on something.  If you're going to get mad at me about something, I'm done.  I'm just trying to help, I didn't cause this problem and you're NOT going to chew my ass about how frustrating it is for you, I understand it's frustrating but I'm not the enemy, I got my ass chewed by customers for five years about this and it's not happening anymore.  I really don't care that your grandson's best friends uncle is good with computers and said everything should work and knows more than me in your opinion.  If that's the case get him over there to make it work.  Also if you don't follow my advice, don't tell me that I couldn't figure it out.  I CAN MAKE YOUR STREAMING EXPERIENCE WORK but you have to help me help you.  I'm not sure if there is a way on here to send private messages so we could exchange phone numbers but if someone could help me through that and follow these other guidelines I will be happy to help whoever out.

Also Pete, please stop giving advice about things you don't undersand.  I know your heart is in the right place and you did give a lot of good advice but you also are flat wrong about a lot of other things.  PLEASE don't take this the wrong way but people like you are contributing to the frustration of streaming.  Giving bad advice is the worst thing you can do, if you don't know, you don't know and that's Ok.  I'm not a terribly smart guy and you might very well be much smarter than I am, but I do know how this works and why and I can tell you that you are giving a lot of false information, I'm not going to debate you anymore as we have already done that and you're not going to listen to me anyway.  But It would be no different than asking me to diagnose your heart issue, I can read about things online but that doesn't make me a heart specialist.  And in the long run you're not going to be happy with what I tell you because it would just be me speculating.

I apologize to everyone on here for writing a book lol.

Older ROKU tv's or little boxes get outdated and cannot handle the new updates Flo gives to the platform.  I have been saying this for a long time, it is usually not Flo, but what you are watching it on.  I went from buffering a whole lot, waiting for it to load, and I did what you did and the speed is amazing. I bought the cheapest ROKU box for like $19.99 and what a difference

I bought a Fire Stick a few years ago as a backup but Floracing has been reliable enough on the Roku TV to not have to use it.  All this app and upgrade stuff makes sense as hardware requirements increase in proportion to upgrades to the broadcast.  I've got open HDMI connections so we're ready for anything.  Who knows, I might even actually attend a race.  That infield setup at Husets would be perfect for digging the camera and lawn chair out and snapping a few.  My thoughts when it comes to attending races always go straight to finding a way to increase the photo collection.  Grandstands have never been much fun.  

Stan Meissner

Great to know.  My Roku's are fairly new (not sure if the same one) and I couldn't get them to work consistently.  I will double-check when I get home.  It's incredible how quickly this stuff goes out of date.  I purchased a laptop about 5 or 6 years ago.  A year later, I had an issue and contacted their customer service.  They said this particular unit was out of date and they no longer supported it...................yet I just purchased it brand new a year earlier.  Same just happened with a 3D Printer I have.  They said "wow, you have the old control----we don't even service those anymore"-----it was a $25,000 machine and it's only a few years old.  

Anyone having issues, it's something on your end unless Flo or DV say they are having difficulties.  It doesn't mean you necessarily did something wrong, you just haven't kept up with the demand to run the programming.  

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.  

Thank you for understanding.  I read through what I wrote and thought "Boy,I sound like an arrogant asshole".  I promise, I'm not trying to be lol.  I'm not going to try to give you an answer as I don't have enough information but it sounds like you have someone capable of helping you.  These are just some random thoughts, but it might not helpful to your situation.

WiFi is "fun" sometimes, especially with older devices.  For years "like since 2013 or 2014) WiFi AC or WiFi 5 was the cat's meow and probably still works pretty good but we're now into WiFi 7 which means older devices aren't going to work as well.  If I had to guess, the printer you're having issues with is an HP printer?  I only say this because HP printers from a few years ago on back (I haven't messed with them for a couple of years) were notoriously terrible when it came to WiFi, not that other printers didn't have their issues but HPs were always an issues with WiFi.  Maybe not always but I got plenty of calls where customers would say their HP printer has always worked but they got up this morning and it wouldn't work.  I would factory reset it, uninstal/reinstall the printer on their computer, uninstall/reinstall the drivers on their computer and it just wouldn't work, no idea why, but stuff like that was common with HP printers.  

As for your TV, I'm not going to guess a brand (since there's a ton of them and a ton of shitty ones lol) but I know Vizio TVs from five years ago or more were horrible on WiFi.  I went to plenty of calls where a customer might be paying for 100 mbps, you would run the speed test on the TV and it might give you 4 mbps, I would set my phone next to the TV and run a speed test on my phone and get the 100 mbps.  It was pretty easy to point out to the customer at that point that the issue was with their TV.  Vizios were notorious for that kind of stuff.  Which is why I say I'm not a fan of smart TVs.  They might work great for a year or two but then do you throw the whole TV out because the smart portion doesn't work?  Roku TVs are horrible for this issue, if you have a conventional smart TV, you could add a streaming box to this TV and then use that instead of the smart TV apps.  But if you have a Roku TV and something goes out on the Roku side of the TV try hooking a Roku Ultra up to a Roku TV.  I know exactly what's going on and why but holy shit, it's confusing.  You need to use one of the Roku remotes to choose the input and change the volume and once your on the input of the Roku plugged into it, you use that remote for the one that's hooked up to it, but if you want to change the volume of the TV or shut it off you need to go back to the other remote, oh by the way you can't program that other remote to control the volume or power of the TV, nevermind you are dealing with two different devices with the same interface and identical remotes, adding a Roku to a Roku TV is not a practical option for most people.  So when the Roku TV gets a little slow in a few years, do you just throw it away?  Personally I don't mind spending money on TVs but I only buy them every 10-15 years.  Since 2004 I've bought 3 TVs, I spend a fair amount of money on TVs and don't want to replace them when the WiFi card is out of date in it or the CPU is too old to run the latest codec.  I'd rather throw a different streaming box on it and keep using it.  This is going to be really tough with Roku TVs especially.  I'm a big fan of buying multiple devices from people who specialize in what they do. 

But you're correct, gotta love technology.  We're in a changing world right now, as we always have been.  I would love to go back in time to when electricity was introduced in people's homes.  When a bulb burned out in one room did some people call the electric company and say "What the fuck?  You promised me all I'd have to do is flip this switch and I'd always have light.  Of coarse you're going to tell me it's my light bulb that's the problem, you guys never have any problems at all do you?  We never had these problems with candles, I knew this was too good to be true."  Nowadays we laugh at something like this.  But what will our grandkids think of our bitching about Wifi or streaming in 100 years?

Interesting post that touches on a lot of things.  One thing to note is that it's true Netflix is not live streaming but many of us watch live streaming local channels through streaming providers.  We use the Hulu + streaming service and I watch live sports on network and ESPN among others.  Those are examples of the best infastructure of all streaming services.  Dirtvision, Flo and all the other racing channels are nowhere near that level of service.  
 

25 Mbps, gaming and updates along with hard wiring to the modem are mentioned as well.  We have 250Mbps, ten times the speed mentioned and have been hard wired to the router for several years.  There are no gamers living here, my wife watches her shows on one hard wired TV and I watch the other.  The most devices being used at once are two TV's and maybe an iPhone looking something up.  
 

I do occasionally see a few seconds of buffering on Flo that I don't see with my live sports n Hulu or streaming live events.  The slight occasional buffering is never so much that I miss any racing unless the whole broadcast is down and it's verified by the streaming channel and online chatter.  Basically if I'm going to see any buffering at all on either TV it's going to be on Flo.  Our Roku TV's are 4K capable and standard broadcasts are 1080 so these TV's can handle a lot.  For example, I'll be watching the entire stream of the Indy 500 on Hulu without any buffering.  Likewise NFL football and NASCAR races never buffer.  If the problem with streaming is on my end wouldn't I see buffering with Vikings games and the ten o'clock news which are both liv streams?  The problem is dirt track streaming channels aren't as reliable as other live streaming services like Hulu + and YouTube TV.  

Stan Meissner

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.  

Stan Meissner

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.