Android TV box speed

Garvan

Hi there

I'm not sure this is the correct section and i apologise if it's not.

I have 250mbps internet speed from UPC. I have approximately that and i have tested using it using Ookla and UPC's own speed test.

I have an mbox android tv box downstairs but it only streams at about 25mbps (using a 30 metre cat 6 cable)

Everything stutters and I'm going insane

It seems therefore that the issue is the tv box but I would have thought that it would be well able for those speeds seeing as it's there to stream hd stuff???

Please help!

TimHorton

Check if there is a firmware update for the Android TV box ,
Tried one of them with Porpcorn Time and it was useless with 240mb UPC , Using a galaxy tab with the same APK was fine , Those android tv boxes are junk.

Cuddlesworth

Did you get the Ubee box?

TimHorton

I have the old Cisco Box

frank0r

All depends, can your router handle the cat6 properly, I know this sounds stupid but most of the UPC boxes we get are reconditioned crap!

Also you can have other issues with interference along the cable if you have a laptop or another pc connect it to where the box is and run wireshark search on google it will give you some great info on any general stutter on the line in the house (if the graph is not nice then there is general interference.

I have a box and must admit have no issues, now its connected with cat 5 cable and about the same distance and there is only one dodgy area where there is some mains wires beside it so moved it as far as the spare cable would go in the crawl space in the attic so to reduce issue.

You can also buy a cheap router with good qos and connect the box to that and it can help with the stutter as this could be streaming issues between the box cable and router. I have this upstairs and also my printer is connected to it as well.

I know my box I have had no major issues with ti but its an M8 version would not touch the m6 android boxes, but then had to buy 2 M8's as one was utter crap (I did not read the specs properly) and luckily it was also faulty so could get my money back then hunted some more and found a better one. You need a minimum of Amlogic S802 Quad core Cortex A9 r4 2.0GHz x4 Octa-core Mali-450MP GPU @ 600MHz 3D engine and also make sure that you get a decent SD card with atleast a class 10 and save your moves to this and not the actualy box as it will kill your space and buffering on the device will have massive stutter as well.

Cuddlesworth

frank0r wrote: »

All depends, can your router handle the cat6 properly, I know this sounds stupid but most of the UPC boxes we get are reconditioned crap!

Also you can have other issues with interference along the cable if you have a laptop or another pc connect it to where the box is and run wireshark search on google it will give you some great info on any general stutter on the line in the house (if the graph is not nice then there is general interference.

I have a box and must admit have no issues, now its connected with cat 5 cable and about the same distance and there is only one dodgy area where there is some mains wires beside it so moved it as far as the spare cable would go in the crawl space in the attic so to reduce issue.

You can also buy a cheap router with good qos and connect the box to that and it can help with the stutter as this could be streaming issues between the box cable and router. I have this upstairs and also my printer is connected to it as well.

Most of this post is well intentioned crap.

25Mbps is the speed of a half duplex connection. 1gig adapters auto negotiate. If they fail, they drop to the lowest standard, usually 100Mb half duplex. Failure in most cases is indicative of a cabling problem. Since you're on the old cisco box(which is fine), you most likely have a cable problem. Interference isn't possible on a 30meter CAT6 cable unless you're running a industrial power plant near by. Its shielded as a standard.

You need to do a basic cable check first, make sure all pairs are connected correctly and working and there are no breaks in the line. Its very likely you have a pinout or cable break problem. You could also drop another 1gig device onto the cable and check what it syncs at, see if it's specific to the adapter on the Android box. Some adapters have slightly different tolerances.

At the worst, set the android box to 100Mb full duplex. This would be more than fine for video streaming. If its a adapter problem that will work. If its a pinout/cable break then it won't.

frank0r

With connectivity issues there is a huge amount that could go wrong and trying to find out what it is is a real pain. I know the cisco box from upc is hit and miss at the best of times and more of these devices have been replaced. In my house the only time I got a stable connection be it wired or wifi was when I got a separate router to handle the wifi then a lot became stable.

In my attic I just moved the cable for safety and yes the cat6 is no where near susceptible to electrical interference, me personally would rather eliminate this all together if its not grief to do so (but there is loads of anecdotal evidence.

Cheap router to do the qos removes the work of the android box and can help with general network stability.

Or the box is just crap, personally only consider an M8

Cuddlesworth

I'll explain where you went wrong.

frank0r wrote: »

All depends, can your router handle the cat6 properly, I know this sounds stupid but most of the UPC boxes we get are reconditioned crap!

Cat 5 and above do 1 gig. Ports don't have a issue with better cable standards simply because they are better cables. They only have a problem when negotiating higher speeds(10gig+) over longer distances. 100 meters is where you start hitting trouble, not 30m.

frank0r wrote: »

Also you can have other issues with interference along the cable if you have a laptop or another pc connect it to where the box is and run wireshark search on google it will give you some great info on any general stutter on the line in the house (if the graph is not nice then there is general interference.

Interference in a home is unlikely, unless he wrapped the network cable around his microwave. Even then, its unlikely to create a problem on the initial negotiation.

Wireshark is a packet analyzer. Run it on a machine, it captures the packets that machine sends and receives. Most of that traffic is unidirectional, created by the machine itself. None of it has any relation or impact to the quality of that entire network outside of a broadcast storm. The OP isn't having a broadcast storm problem.

frank0r wrote: »

I have a box and must admit have no issues, now its connected with cat 5 cable and about the same distance and there is only one dodgy area where there is some mains wires beside it so moved it as far as the spare cable would go in the crawl space in the attic so to reduce issue.

I'd say you have a internal break in that cable, nothing to do with interference from power supplies.

frank0r wrote: »

You can also buy a cheap router with good qos and connect the box to that and it can help with the stutter as this could be streaming issues between the box cable and router. I have this upstairs and also my printer is connected to it as well.

QOS on home routers limits the maximum amount of traffic a single host can request from the WAN link. Or it assigns priority to specific ports. Its not really a catch all for perfect streaming. A 1080p stream needs roughly 4Mbps of reliable bandwidth. It sends that stream via UDP to the client. The OPS problem is his half duplex connection. He is constantly interrupting the incoming stream and queuing the UDP packets. A number of those would then be dropped, meaning missed I frames or simply enough data missing to corrupt the stream. Most clients now days simply pause until enough constant data comes in to start back up again.

frank0r wrote: »

With connectivity issues there is a huge amount that could go wrong and trying to find out what it is is a real pain. I know the cisco box from upc is hit and miss at the best of times and more of these devices have been replaced. In my house the only time I got a stable connection be it wired or wifi was when I got a separate router to handle the wifi then a lot became stable.

There isn't really much that can go wrong with network connectivity in a home situation. You can identify and fix most issues in 5 questions/tasks or less.

The 3925 was overworked. A torrent or large number of clients would cause it to restart. It was possible to either cool it down, reduce the workload or turn it into bridge mode. All worked well and turned it into a very reliable device. None of which would help the OP and are not relevant to his problem.

The current tech teams in UPC seem eager to replace them as they are handing them out en-mass to business customers as bridged devices. My own device was picked up the same day I cancelled my line. Over eager to get it was a understatement. Plus UPCs current policy is DS-lite to save them IPV4 address space. Every modem replaced is another IPV4 address saved.

frank0r wrote: »

In my attic I just moved the cable for safety and yes the cat6 is no where near susceptible to electrical interference, me personally would rather eliminate this all together if its not grief to do so (but there is loads of anecdotal evidence.

First step to diagnosing a connection issue is to rule out the obvious, not focus on a rare possibliity. In fact, its the first step to diagnosing most things.

frank0r wrote: »

Cheap router to do the qos removes the work of the android box and can help with general network stability.

QOS on the gateway would in no way reduce or affect the workload on a separate device within a network.

frank0r wrote: »

Or the box is just crap, personally only consider an M8

Could be, I know nothing of those android boxes.

frank0r

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I'll explain where you went wrong.
Cat 5 and above do 1 gig. Ports don't have a issue with better cable standards simply because they are better cables. They only have a problem when negotiating higher speeds(10gig+) over longer distances. 100 meters is where you start hitting trouble, not 30m.

Interference in a home is unlikely, unless he wrapped the network cable around his microwave. Even then, its unlikely to create a problem on the initial negotiation.

Yes in principle I do agree with you, but there is a massive amount of anecdotal evidence that suggests this is still an issue. Ping times will still be good but is can have a big effect on latency, but its anecdotal like I say, so for me I still try to avoid it where possible.

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Wireshark is a packet analyzer. Run it on a machine, it captures the packets that machine sends and receives. Most of that traffic is unidirectional, created by the machine itself. None of it has any relation or impact to the quality of that entire network outside of a broadcast storm. The OP isn't having a broadcast storm problem.

True, but it gives valuable information and if the laptop stands up and has no issues with streaming with everything else been the same than its the android box thats at fault (quick and simple way to see if there is an issue.. just run streams at full hd quality in you tube and if keeps on flicking back to normal then you have a problem.

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I'd say you have a internal break in that cable, nothing to do with interference from power supplies.

That or the box is at fault, some of them are not the best

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

QOS on home routers limits the maximum amount of traffic a single host can request from the WAN link. Or it assigns priority to specific ports. Its not really a catch all for perfect streaming. A 1080p stream needs roughly 4Mbps of reliable bandwidth. It sends that stream via UDP to the client. The OPS problem is his half duplex connection. He is constantly interrupting the incoming stream and queuing the UDP packets. A number of those would then be dropped, meaning missed I frames or simply enough data missing to corrupt the stream. Most clients now days simply pause until enough constant data comes in to start back up again.

With good QOS and error correction they can help stabilise the issue, and if there are torrents or anything else on the network and the Android box is getting pure connectivity then all else fails and the box is fine by itself then this can help improve things thats all.

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

There isn't really much that can go wrong with network connectivity in a home situation. You can identify and fix most issues in 5 questions/tasks or less.

hehe I have seen a massive amount go wrong as soon as there are a multitude of devices connected from phones, tablets, smart devices, laptops all pulling on the poor router! As soon as wifi is introduced then it also can cause a world of pain. Then this will affect the quality and performance of the router in general (have seen too many instances of this).

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

The 3925 was overworked. A torrent or large number of clients would cause it to restart. It was possible to either cool it down, reduce the workload or turn it into bridge mode. All worked well and turned it into a very reliable device. None of which would help the OP and are not relevant to his problem.

The current tech teams in UPC seem eager to replace them as they are handing them out en-mass to business customers as bridged devices. My own device was picked up the same day I cancelled my line. Over eager to get it was a understatement. Plus UPCs current policy is DS-lite to save them IPV4 address space. Every modem replaced is another IPV4 address saved.



First step to diagnosing a connection issue is to rule out the obvious, not focus on a rare possibliity. In fact, its the first step to diagnosing most things.



QOS on the gateway would in no way reduce or affect the workload on a separate device within a network.

I agree with everything you say above, but like I say I have found plenty of times on fixing a network where spreading the load (another router), applying qos on the network etc can make a big difference if it is network related...but for me is to identify is there something wrong with the cable and then find the causes.. connecting another device upstairs and running similar tests, streaming etc. and if it causes similar problems then its the cable.. if it doesn't and when you connect the box and its still an issue then its the box, so its the box that needs sorting. It could be there is not enough space on it XBMC has this nasty little habit of not clearing down its cache and you can see a massive data file on the box that once deleted everything improves, these files will include failed streams and successful ones.

Getting a good SD card for additional memory will solve the problem (short term).
If there are too many apps on the device again this can cause issues as we only have a small amount of hard disk space and again if there is not sufficient space for buffering streaming the media you will get jitters.

Garvan

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Did you get the Ubee box?

Nope. MBOX if that means anything

frank0r

ok the first one I got which was crap and did not work but had one of the bad processors in it. After good bit of research got the other one from themagictvbox.ie which have no problems with. had to reflash after stupid user (which I will refer to myself as user in the third person ) error.

Cuddlesworth

Garvan wrote: »

Nope. MBOX if that means anything

The modem/router that UPC supplied you? What make is it?

Their newer units from Ubee have a pretty severe issue with anything that isn't a 1gig network port, as highlighted by multiple users in this forum.

Here is a tread on it in the talk to forum,

http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057372073

Garvan

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

The modem/router that Cisco supplied you? What make is it?

Their newer units from Ubee have a pretty severe issue with anything that isn't a 1gig network port, as highlighted by multiple users in this forum.

Here is a tread on it in the talk to forum,

http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057372073

Oh that's the (what I understand to be total crap) Technicolour TC7200. I rang UPC to see if they would change it to the cisco unit but PFO was all I got

To update I'm convinced it's the box.

When I connect my Mac via ethernet to the UPC modem, it's showing 200mbps+ on Ookla and UPC speed tests.

When I connect the TV box via ethernet to the modem, I get roughly 30-40mbps

When I connect the tv box via wi-fi (d-Link AC1750) one test returned 91mbps but it's generally 60-70mbps.

I think I'll be trying a different tv box!

Thanks all for your help!

G

Cuddlesworth

Just to point out, for the purposes of streaming you don't need 200Mbps out of a box. Even 20Mbps would do around 4k now days.

Garvan

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Just to point out, for the purposes of streaming you don't need 200Mbps out of a box. Even 20Mbps would do around 4k now days.

Do you mean from the router or the tv box?

All I can really say is that the speed test on the TV box isn't great and HD and sometimes SD stutters and the audio sync can be out too!

G

Cuddlesworth

Garvan wrote: »

Do you mean from the router or the tv box?

All I can really say is that the speed test on the TV box isn't great and HD and sometimes SD stutters and the audio sync can be out too!

G

From anything to anything. You just need a reliable downstream connection of 5Mbps for 1080p.

Garvan

Ah.... I see the key word now...reliable

Anyway. I'm confounded! If all I need is 5 and I'm getting 30mbps-ish there must be savage interference from somewhere.

I guess you guys have probably never used one but can anyone recommend a network doctor and could show me the simple thing that I may have missed?? South Dublin area

G

frank0r

Garvan wrote: »

Oh that's the (what I understand to be total crap) Technicolour TC7200. I rang UPC to see if they would change it to the cisco unit but PFO was all I got

To update I'm convinced it's the box.

When I connect my Mac via ethernet to the UPC modem, it's showing 200mbps+ on Ookla and UPC speed tests.

When I connect the TV box via ethernet to the modem, I get roughly 30-40mbps

When I connect the tv box via wi-fi (d-Link AC1750) one test returned 91mbps but it's generally 60-70mbps.

I think I'll be trying a different tv box!

Thanks all for your help!

G

ohh god the Technicolour is beyond total crap, would not mind if it was just that!... as soon as you hang more than 3 wifi devices of it has a hissy fit and fails down, as it can't handle any range with decent power... you push upc enough and they will send you a free wifi router or credit you to the same value!

Honestly the cisco is a little bit better if you are lucky. If there was other choices on broadband I would dump ups so quickly!!!

frank0r

Garvan wrote: »

Ah.... I see the key word now...reliable

Anyway. I'm confounded! If all I need is 5 and I'm getting 30mbps-ish there must be savage interference from somewhere.

I guess you guys have probably never used one but can anyone recommend a network doctor and could show me the simple thing that I may have missed?? South Dublin area

G

Its not so much that... how much space do you have left on your box and can you send the specs of it .. this for me would be the bare minimum to be honest - sorry can't complete the url.. you know the rest themagictvbox.ie/about_the_box/
OS: Android 4.4 Kitkat + XBMC 13.2 Gotham, Google Play store, Flash player Installed
Amlogic S802 Quad core Cortex A9 r4 2.0GHz x4
Octa-core Mali-450MP GPU @ 600MHz 3D engine
2GB DDR3 Ram, 8GB NAND flash, 2.4Ghz/5Ghz WIFI+ Bluetooth 4.0


The Amlogic is one of the better ones out there at the moment there is a lot of them available but no where near as good and few buck cheaper but not really worth it.

frank0r

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

From anything to anything. You just need a reliable downstream connection of 5Mbps for 1080p.

not unless the hard disk is close to full then it would be like hanging a windows 95 on a gig network.. no matter how good the network card forget about any decent speeds above even a meg

Cuddlesworth

Garvan wrote: »

Ah.... I see the key word now...reliable

Anyway. I'm confounded! If all I need is 5 and I'm getting 30mbps-ish there must be savage interference from somewhere.

I guess you guys have probably never used one but can anyone recommend a network doctor and could show me the simple thing that I may have missed?? South Dublin area

G

What are you having a problem streaming? Local content, online content. Youtube, twitch, or other sources?