Post by garym@pippin, Could you elaborate on this. So my Transporter has a smaller
internal buffer than my Touch or Radio.
Well, it's all about that "Net Neutrality" thing everybody keeps talking
about.
Yes. I don't know the exact figures for the Transporter but Touch and
Radio use 3MB which is a bit of a top-end compromise. iPeng by default
uses 8MB but to do this we had to include an option to use a smaller
buffer because it conflicts with some services, namely Pandora but also
internet radio stations can be affected and e.g show wrong track
information.
You rarely really need a big buffer over your local network, iPeng's is
primarily there for people using it e.g. in a car.
What a larger buffer buys you is reliability with unstable connections.
It doesn't help when bandwidth is the problem (because then you won't
get a large buffer filled anyway) and you don't need it when everything
is fine.
But streaming over the internet _can_ be unstable. "Unstable" in this
case might simply mean that a packet shows up 10s late because something
on the way between the server and you is congested. This is a problem
for streaming and the reason streaming providers build up those huge
CDNs (content distribution networks). It's not the bandwidth itself
(which is usually sufficient) and not the latency (which doesn't matter,
you're going to buffer more than one or two seconds anyway and you
almost never have more latency than that), it's congestion causing
interruptions.
Now... a little background on what happens on your network on Saturday
evening...
What the internet is being used for (in the US) on Saturday evening is
Netflix and YouTube. The two combined make up more than 50% of peak
internet traffic in the US.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/20686/20141122/netflix-is-hogging-35-percent-of-peak-internet-traffic-in-north-america-what-about-others.htm
That's a lot of traffic you need to get your packets through. But that
alone is not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that NetFlix and
YouTube have priority access to your network (to the distribution
network from the backbone to your home) because they don't feed their
stream through the "normal" internet backbone but directly to the ISP's
networks.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/01/understanding-netflix-neutrality/
What this means in this case is: when your TIDAL stream arrives at your
ISP's network, all those NetFlix and YouTube streams are already there
using up bandwidth and your packets have to make their way through the
rest. There is enough capacity that they will get through, that's why
you still see high bandwidth figures when you measure your connection,
but some may arrive later because they had to wait (or even be
re-transmitted if it's an IP based stream) and if the delay for one
packet exceeds your buffer size... dang.
You can get around this with a bigger buffer because the overall
bandwidth is not affected. After some of your packets waited for 10s it
might be that a lot of them arrive almost at the same time so you _do_
have bandwidth to fill a bigger buffer which is why you often build
bigger buffers into the native Apps for such services - after all the
service knows it has to support that.
All of that said: That's for "normal" operation.
From my experience with occasional issues with TIDAL I actually had the
impression that when there is heavy stuttering then there is a bandwidth
issue of some kind because streams never really recover. I don't know
whether it's on my side or on TIDAL's. It usually goes away after a few
minutes (it's also pretty rare). It could be that e.g. something in my
area is temporarily eating a lot of bandwidth. Or, if it's on TIDAL's
side it could be that the node they are streaming through is too
congested. Given how fast things seem to usually improve I'd almost
guess it's the latter and TIDAL (or their CDN, I think they are not
operating that themselves) re-configures the network to use other, less
congested nodes instead.
---
learn more about iPeng, the iPhone and iPad remote for the Squeezebox
and
Logitech UE Smart Radio as well as iPeng Party, the free Party-App,
at penguinlovesmusic.com
*New: iPeng 8, the Universal App for iOS 7 and iOS 8*
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