Manual Selection of Bit Rate While Connected via VPN

Support & Troubleshooting
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Looking for some pointers from the crew here. More and more hotel chains are now limiting the bandwidth of their ‘free’ wifi. I have a VPN server on my local network that I use whenever I connect from a hotel or other public hotspot. With no bandwidth restrictions, this works fine. Tablo thinks my tablets & phones are locally connected and streams without issue. This breaks when the hotel bandwidth is throttled. I get buffer after buffer, and no smooth stream. Makes sense. Tablo thinks I’m locally connected and is sending me the full bandwidth stream. As of right now, my only solution has been to turn off the VPN client, and Tablo then thinks I’m remotely connected and I can adjust the bit rate via the Tablo remote settings.

The problem is that I don’t like to turn off my VPN client. Is there a way - either on the VPN side or via Tablo, to essentially force Tablo to think I’m remotely connected so it utilizes the remote bandwith settings - allowing me to choose the bandwidth I want? Or alternatively, can Tablo be made to allow me to adjust the bandwidth for locally connected clients just like we can for remote clients?

I’d appreciate any thoughts or suggestions!
Thanks,
Mike

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This is the only way at the moment.

Tablo will have to allow bitrate adjustments on local streaming too. This could get problematic for novice users of the Tablo if local streaming isn’t always at the ‘Full Quality’.

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Hi MikeNE, another brute force option might be to use one of the excellent Ripper programs that have been posted on the forum. This would allow you to download at best available network speed and then watch locally (laptop) at normal video rate. Since you are on VPN this should be no problem.

Perhaps at some point Tablo will enable a “watch offline” feature similar to the new Youtube android app which would essentially be the same thing in one easy step.

1 Like
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Thanks guys. @js98, that’s actually what I’ve been doing. It’s a bit cumbersome, plus I loose the skip 30 sec feature - at least in my players.

Oh well. I was just hoping there was a better way…even if it involved some way of denying the Tablo client access to the VPN.

Mike

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