Remote Streaming crappy

I bought a tablo specifically for remote streaming of the local news since I am away most of the winter. I have never been able to get it to perform adequately. Nor have I gotten much help from Tablo customer service. Any ideas? I have at least 10 mg upload at home connected via ethernet. Here at my vacation place I have 50 mg download. I am using a 4k firestick (Tablo recommendation). The buffering using the firestick is unwatchable even at the SD 480 live tv setting and the 500 kb remote streaming setting. It is better with my laptop at those settings, (still some buffering, but watchable) but I have to connect with the HDMI cable to the TV which is a pain. It works great at home, but why bother since I can just watch live with the antenna. I dont watch much of what we record. Any ideas would be appreciated, before I junk the whole thing and get a streaming box.

Likely just shit latency between your local location and remote location. ISPs do not maintain great connection between all areas on the internet.

Steaming from Netflix servers or Amazon servers is very intricate actually to ensure you get the fastest speed possible. There is big investments into it.

If your local upload speed is in fact 10 Mbps and your remote download speed is 50 Mbps, you should have zero problems. If there is buffering you can call either ISP (local or remote) to fix their crap service.

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One thought, a little complicated. Sometimes an ISP doesn’t like to support video streams (especially not Netflix, recognizing that customers want their Netflix and they better not interfere). The ISP can detect from your packets the kind of traffic you are producing. Other ISPs will prioritize video so you get a good service, while degrading, e.g., email, since you probably won’t notice that being choppy.

One way to test that is to use a VPN and then re-connect to the relevant datastream (such as a web browser streaming Tablo). I’ve found that sometimes that greatly improves the quality because the ISP cannot tell that the data is a video stream and doesn’t degrade it. You can install a VPN like NordVPN on your Firestick (I have). If you run it and then try Tablo you might find a better result.

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I doubt this ISP is packet shaping the Tablo stream.

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I ran a speedtest connecting to my comcast isp in Seattle where my tablo is to here in Mexico (telmex) and twice got a ping rate around 95 to my laptop, so that does not sound terrific. Tablo asked me to run “route this helps”. I dont know what they would discover from that and they never told me. I have used VPNs before down here and that always slowed things down. Any additional thoughts would be appreciated.

BTW: Streaming 1080 content will consume your entire upload bandwidth. I recommend trying 480i first, then 720 @ 30fps etc. to see if you can get steady streaming at any bit-rate. If you are streaming at full resolution, you are just asking for trouble with that 10MBps uplink speed.

If you did not already know this, you can tell your Tablo what resolution to use when streaming externally. I have my Tablo set to 1080 for live TV, but only 480 for remote streaming since I normally watch from my phone when I am traveling. It is trivial to log on to the Tablo and change that setting remotely should I want to watch something in higher res from my laptop, for example. You can even make these changes from your location in Mexico and try different settings.

This is very good advice in my experience. If you can’t get it to work at the lowest resolution, then this is unlikely to be viable in your situation. If you can, then you can experiment with better resolution.