Forum: HoseHeads Sprint Car General Forum (go)
Moderators: dirtonly  /  dmantx  /  hosehead

Is it my equipment or issues with the livestreaming of last nights event at Tulare California.  All was good until the A feature, then the buffering started and made it impossible to even watch the event.  Did anyone else have the same trouble?  If not,what can I do to fix the problem?

Mine usually never buffers but did some in the A too.  It wasn't all out buffering, just now and then and I was able to watch the whole race.  I just figured it was my internet but maybe not.  

I had a major problem on Wed night trying to watch the midget show from IRP and NASCAR Mods from Thompson CN.  It got so bad that I restarted my computer but it did not help,  I finally went back and cleaned out my browser.  By the time it was cleaned out there were 35 laps left in the mod feature and I was able to watch the finish of the race.  I was able to watch the Focus Midget feature with only one slight buffering issue.  I was texting with a friend in OR and he was not having an issue with his feed on TV.  Last night was not a problem at all.  I have an older laptop and have issues with google chrome not responding many times especially when I am trying to read different newspapers that I get daily on my e-mail account so in my case I think its is an equipment not an internet issue.  I will add that I was using my computer in my ground level family room as I had the Phillies game on in the background and sometimes I have an issue with cell phone reception in that room.  Last night I was using it a second floor room.  For what it is worth, I have had no issues when other people have posted they are having issues and it seams like I am having an issue and other people are having no problems. 

I had a long discussion about this at the Knoxville Nationals with an "IT dude."  (I can vouch for his work----I've seen it, and he provides service to some very large businesses and homes alike)   The issue has nothing to do with Flo or DV.  You will have to keep up on your equipment and internet service.  Old, outdated equipment (which in the IT world can mean 12 months) may not work as well or work at all.  Internet service can be fantastic coming into your house, and be terrible 15 feet from your router.  It's all what you do with the service once you get it into your home.  He said in pretty plain language:  Anyone having issues with DV or FLO has some upgrading to do, or changes to be made with how their service is delivered inside of their home.  Period.   Asking if anyone else is having buffering issues every night is like pissing in the wind.  Buffering in your house has nothing to do with your neighbors or people across the country.  Your buffering issue is 99% of the time your buffering issue.  

I wish this topic would die.  

ROKU is the way to go and inexpensive at that.  Get roku and download the flo app and no more issues, mine lst night was perfect start to finish...

Ascot was the greatest of all time..

West Capital wasn't half bad either..

Life is good...

I don't think ROKU is a one size fits all answer. It may have been your answer for your problem but may not do Cheroger any good at all. I don't have a ROKU and I watch DV and Flo from my Windows based Lenovo Legion gaming Laptop cast to my Smart TV with no problems and no buffering. I used to have problems with buffering constantly when watching off the apps right from my smart TV. I eliminated that from the equation and no more problems. At first I was just hooking an HDMI cable up from the Laptop to the TV but it was a PITA and then the lightbulb came on and I realized I could just cast it right to my smart TV wirelessly and I didn't even have to get out of my chair. As Ergas said more often than not it's a problem with the equipment on the users end.  

The older I get the faster I was

+1 I haven't had a single issue with flo after I got the roku express and downloaded the flosports app. I think I paid $29 on amazon. With my laptop it was becoming a nightmare.

A

It seems like this topic has been beaten to death.  But I understand your frustration.  Months ago, I posted a lengthy description of how and why streaming TV works the way it does.  I won't say I'm an expert but I do understand this stuff well enough to get it to work anywhere.  I found my reply and I'll repost it here.  The offer still stands in there, if you would like some help.  But here it is.

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.

Hardon wrote a pretty accurate post, so read that. Short and sweet, Flo/DV and every major streamer knows if there are issues on their end - if so, they typically post on social media about it and even move streams to other content delivery systems. For example, Flo has shown full shows on YouTube for free when having issues 

Issues are likely on the end user's side - as hardon noted, could be their internet service provider, their local networking or hardware. All good advice on his part. 

Zero issues once we got Roku for DV and FLo streaming

same here for me with hdmi, buffering out the aaaaaaaaaaz..

Ascot was the greatest of all time..

West Capital wasn't half bad either..

Life is good...

would you mind repeating that please...

Ascot was the greatest of all time..

West Capital wasn't half bad either..

Life is good...

Is there anyway you can skip the wifi and wire direct?  

I have been saying this since day 1 of these complaints.