Streaming from cloud drive

[Dimtar]

Hi All.

 

I have done a little reading here and done some Google searches but nothing really seems to cover the topic well enough so I thought I would start a topic with upto date information. Is anyone successfully streaming smooth video from a Cloud Drive? Looking for mostly answers around Google Drive as a provider but i'll take information on any provider.

 

I've done a fair bit of testing over the last two weeks and results have never been good. Using the latest version of Cloud Drive (.802) I have created a drive with Google Drive on both my local machine (100/40mbps connection) and a VPS (1000mbps). The drive is a 10TB reFS drive with a minimum chunk size of 20MB. No matter what settings I use for prefetch it seems video just doesn't stream well. I have checked with files 1GB to 10GB in size and the results are always the same either via Plex or VLC. They are a mix of youtube rips and shadowplay recordings.

 

Speeds from Google Drive range from 10-100mbps down according to the Cloud Drive UI but no matter what the video pauses occasionally. I've even adjusted the cache to be twice the size of whatever video I am testing. I don't mind waiting at the start of the video for it to cache etc. as long as its smooth from that point on. Is streaming file through cloud drive a pipe dream or have I just got a setting wrong?

 

All discussion welcome, thank you.

[Akame]

For me streaming works if I do 20 download and upload threads, prefetching start 1 and prefetching stop 200 and keep it for 100 seconds.

But it is smooth to stream but to go back and forward there is noticable delay. 

[17thspartan]

I experienced some stuttering but not much (.827). I tried using VLC to play a 40 minute video, 1.1GB@720P (not sure about the bitrate), and in the first 3-5 minutes it stalled and buffered about 3 times, for 1-3 seconds each time. VLC did that thing where the screen goes grey and is pixelated for a second, and it did that three times in the first 5 minutes as well (normally that issue is caused by the hard drive being spun down, and VLC will show a grey pixelated screen until the hard drive spins up fully). http://i57.tinypic.com/6z3mmc.png(an example of what I mean)

 

For the remainder of the video (minutes 5 to 40), it played well with no interruptions.

 

I noticed that prefetching didn't run constantly and for most of the video (minutes 5-40) it only seemed to grab between 1-5 MB at a time before stopping and restarting again. My cache is only 1gb, which might explain why it didn't prefetch the whole video automatically, and instead only did it a few MB at a time. I didn't notice this until around 10 minutes in, but my cache size remained mostly unchanged (595MB pinned, and 420MB in cache) and the "prefetched" data would hover between 15-25MB.

 

I have prefetching set to whatever the default settings are, and I created the drive using default settings (so it's NTFS and uses whatever the default block/chunk size is). It should probably be noted that I was uploading this entire time as well (with upload verification turned on) and it didn't seem to affect video playback. I had forgotten that I had a 10mbps download speed limit in CloudDrive's UI, and I didn't remember to remove that until about 10 minutes in, but even after turning it off CloudDrive still only downloaded at speeds between 5-12mbps (that's prefetching and the upload verification combined). Also, I have the default number of download and upload threads (2 down, 2 up), but if you include the upload verification it would go up to 4x down at times.

[17thspartan]

I tried playing another video without changing any settings, 2 hour long, 5gb@1080p, and it had a lot more issues. During the first 3 minutes, it stopped and buffered twice, went grey 5 times, and froze 3 times (for a second or two).

 

After that it played fine for a while, up until about 10 minutes in when it froze for a second and then continued playing. From then, until about 40 minutes in (when I stopped watching) it would freeze once (for a second or so) every 2-3 minutes. I also noticed that the prefetching was all over the map, ranging from 1mbps to 15mbps, but it mostly hovered around 6mbps or lower.

[Freppa]

I use Amazon (trial vendor) but it works great. I have 250/100 mbit and I have set prefetch at 400, keep 600, 10/10 threads. I use PLEX as my server setup.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

For me streaming works if I do 20 download and upload threads, prefetching start 1 and prefetching stop 200 and keep it for 100 seconds.

But it is smooth to stream but to go back and forward there is noticable delay. 

increasing the "minimum download size" may also help, as well.  That way it's grabbing more data at once, so there is less overhead, and it's better able to "get up to speed". 

[Freppa]

Ah, just realized one more thing: When setting up the disk, I increased chunks to 50MB. Standard was 1MB. That meant a lot of I/O just to fetch the data, hence not able to stream with desired result.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It can be, but if the provider supports partial reads, then we grab smaller chunks, when appropriate. 

 

But the storage size can make a difference, especially on the provider.

 

But the "Minimum download size" sets the discrete unit size accessed.  Setting this to a larger value means that it only deals with that szie or larger for downloading.  This means more latency (wait time while downloading), but can improve overall performance, especially with a properly configured prefetch settings.