Qos for Hulu

I'm performing an experiment with adjusting Qos for Hulu+. I would get lag and sometimes only 10 seconds of playback with 10 second buffer pauses repeating indefinitely. What was strange is it never seemed to happen during their advertisements, which made me think it was an issue on their end (bandwidth throttling).

A few days ago I set Qos priority on my playstation 3's MAC address (where I perform a majority of my online streaming) and have only had one minor glitch streaming since.

Has anyone else needed to do this to get Hulu to playback properly? Netflix wasn't an issue. But a few months ago we wanted to try NHL gamecenter streaming and it was almost as bad as Hulu, and ended up canceling. If this experiment goes smoothly, we may consider NHL gamecenter again.

QoS at the end device is not going to help you. Your QoS for an inbound stream would be set on your router. However this is not an option on most home routers. What does your home network setup look like? What equipment are you using? What is the bandwidth of your Internet connection?

In addition to these issues, the Playstation is notorious for code problems causing buffering. I actually got tired of Playstation issues and switched to Roku. At the moment the Playstation seems solid for streaming but that is subject to the regularly occurring updates. My suggestion is skip the fight with the Playstation and buy the Roku XS. It's very solid and rarely has problems as long as your home network is set up correctly and you have adequate bandwidth to the Internet.

The Qos is in my ddwrt router, sorry didn't mention that...

If there's a coding issue, based on my symptoms (Netflix fine, Hulu not) then it would seem to be an issue with Hulu's release for the PS3, not the PS3 itself. Would also have to assume all of the releases from Hulu for the other platforms to be equally buggy and flawed. Really don't have money to throw away on another media device, especially since I have the PS3 and it seems to be doing fine otherwise. Would rather make what I have work, or at least narrow down the root cause of the issues so I have a solid case to present to Hulu.

Seems I'm not alone either (example link found on google):

http://www.hulu.com/discussions/10


Issue appears, as I suspected, to be across all platforms. Starting to wonder if it's a Hulu server/hosting issue.

One of the suggestions worth some weight is manually setting the DNS servers to universal (think google) DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 ... might try that!

Pinky said:

The Qos is in my ddwrt router, sorry didn't mention that...

If there's a coding issue, based on my symptoms (Netflix fine, Hulu not) then it would seem to be an issue with Hulu's release for the PS3, not the PS3 itself. Would also have to assume all of the releases from Hulu for the other platforms to be equally buggy and flawed. Really don't have money to throw away on another media device, especially since I have the PS3 and it seems to be doing fine otherwise. Would rather make what I have work, or at least narrow down the root cause of the issues so I have a solid case to present to Hulu.

Seems I'm not alone either (example link found on google):

http://www.hulu.com/discussions/10


Issue appears, as I suspected, to be across all platforms. Starting to wonder if it's a Hulu server/hosting issue.

Click to expand...

It's actually the Playstation. For months Hulu was problem free and Netflix would buffer. You can go onto Netflix and Hulu's forums to find these discussions. Sony provides an update and it fixes one and the other starts misbehaving. They send another update and maybe fix both, the next update breaks one or the other. It just kind of gets old. On the other hand Roku just works.

Anyhow if your ddwrt code supports it, you want to set diffserv values to EF or AF41 for video for your Hulu and Netflix streams. You can do this by setting up rules for the inbound port numbers. Or if the router code is intelligent you should be able to just say set video to high priority. If you just have your router going directly to your PS3 three you want to get that inbound traffic into a low latency queue on it's way to your ps3. The objective here is to give a smooth low latency stream to your PS3. Your router is going to receive the traffic however it comes in from your ISP, but once it's on your network you can prioritize it so that web surfing or whatever does not interfere with watching television. You are changing the behavior from FIFO to this traffic gets top priority.

Yeah, setting the MAC address as priority accomplishes that. The issue isn't what I'm doing (I know what I'm doing), just figure I'd check to see what other's experiences with streaming content have been. Since I only have the one device streaming I can get around setting specific video priorities (otherwise your suggestion applies).

As for issues - it's clear that the issue is NOT related to just the PS3, if you follow that link and poke around as I have it's likely an issue with people's ISP. Mine has been good but not great over the years. We have every few months a block of time where roadrunner in our area makes changes and ALL network traffic slows or haults, people complain, then it suddenly starts working fine again. We obviously don't have either the best engineers at our local time warner office or bad equipment, or both. I'm going to try the DNS change to google's public dns servers and undo the Qos setting to see if that helps. If not, I'll reapply the Qos and let it be for a month and see. It may be coincidence, but Hulu has been running very well since setting Qos.

Well setting QoS on the Playstation isn't going to solve anything as far as video goes. You shape on the outbound and police on the inbound. Setting QoS on the Playstation may help with online gaming.

BTW, on the router you are trying to shape traffic on the switch side of the box, not the router side. Home routers are really a switch and a router combined into one box. Most don't give you any functionality at the switch level.

The DDWRT from what I read will completely control Qos as much as you want/need it to. The MAC priority settings (essentially making all PS3 traffic priority) would indeed work if that was the cause. I suspected it wasn't based on the bandwidth use logs (not enough competing traffic from other network devices), but wanted to at least try it as part of the troubleshooting. Since setting the DNS addresses and removing the Qos settings I've played roughly 3 hours stright of Hulu content on the PS3 without a single glitch. That's promising! So the good news and takeaway from all this will hopefully be that local service provider's quality of service plays a large role in your streaming experience, and that Hulu's higher bandwidth requirements is revealing flaws in many service provider networks [if one were to look at the entirety of the complaints across all platforms].

Next is to test Monday and Tuesday evenings during peak internet traffic times. If it passes that and I don't report back here in the next few weeks we can assume success with the DNS changes.

Pinky, have you cut the cord? As in no cable tv?

QoS will not help provider level issues (congestion). If your router is getting hammered by other internal traffic, then QoS will prioritize that traffic. If you only have one thing going, QoS should do nothing for you. IF, everything between you and the source will handle QoS, then yes, otherwise, no.

The down side of what you`re seeing is that you have a dynamic environment from the perspective of the provider, and the internet for that matter.

Actually this is not entirely correct. Yes it can help with over subscription issues but what it does is prioritize and smooth traffic streams on the outbound side. On the inbound side via policing it can protect high priority traffic by dropping packets that exceed a preset threshold for lower priority traffic. Further at least with my ISP they seem to respect difserv for my voice calls.

I agree. I mentioned if you have a lot of traffic on your router, it will help. If this is the only thing happening in his network it won`t. And I also agree, if your ISP does it, then it helps to a certain degree.

FX4 said:

Actually this is not entirely correct. Yes it can help with over subscription issues but what it does is prioritize and smooth traffic streams on the outbound side. On the inbound side via policing it can protect high priority traffic by dropping packets that exceed a preset threshold for lower priority traffic. Further at least with my ISP they seem to respect difserv for my voice calls.

Click to expand...

i think much anymore, they have too with everyone doing voice.

Angry said:

Pinky, have you cut the cord? As in no cable tv?

Click to expand...

Yes. [We have the minimum $10 /month for local and PBS]


Follow-up -- Qos may or may not have helped, but as I said in my last post I was going to try turning it back off/reverting all of my router's settings to defaults, and manually setting the DNS servers on my PS3 to use Google's. So far after numerous hours, most of it during prime time on weekdays, I've had ZERO issues. So it does indeed appear to be some sort of routing issue and those issues affect the effectiveness of the caching done by Hulu's software. This fix (settings) are described above and I found then on hulu's support forums, so it's something they're aware of but perhaps not anything they have any control over (since the ISP typically sets their own on your router with DHCP, and your devices pull those settings from your router). I'm hopeful now similar issues I experienced with NHL gamecenter will also be resolved (probably not going to order it until next year though).

That is entirely possible because both Hulu and Netflix try to give you the closest server. A different DNS server request may have different results. I'm actually getting my best performance using 4.2.2.2. for my entertainment system. YMMV.

BTW Pinky if you you really want to get the most out of cord cutting given that you are using a DLNA player I suggest adding this to the mix:
www.playon.tv

When I first started with it I couldn't really recommend it because it was pretty buggy but as of late the product has really come into its own. It still has a few bugs but it well within the realm of acceptable.