EXTREMELY SLOW downloads

EduardoQJ03

PrimeVideo downloads are VERY VERY SLOW, I've been downloading the series "The Mentalist" all night and barely downloaded 14 episodes of the first season. It is totally absurd the speed, at this rate it will take me weeks to download the whole series. It is NOT a problem with my internet connection, my speed is very high when downloading from Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+. The problem is with PRIME VIDEO and also PARAMOUNT+. I don't know if it happens with other providers but those are the ones that have a VERY SLOW DOWNLOAD SPEED.

Cats4U

It is NOT a problem with my internet connection, my speed is very high when downloading from Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+. The problem is with PRIME VIDEO and also PARAMOUNT+. I don't know if it happens with other providers but those are the ones that have a VERY SLOW DOWNLOAD SPEED.

You write emphatically that it is NOT your Internet connection. What were the results of the latency test you did to PrimeVideo's CDN to show that? Did you just Ping or did you do a more preferred Tracert?

TomdeOldMan

Speed varies with time of day and the routing. to the source, which is not StreamFab. The source is whatever service you are using.

Right now, I'm using the Roku channel and downloading Space1999 epidsodes. Right now it is reporting about 25 kbps, when it should be up in the 14 or 15 mbps

Internet speed tests Using infinity (my internet provider) reports 94.5 mbps. That's using the same computer I'm currently running with StreamFab.

Running ping and tracert do not show anything unusual, so is this a StreamFab problem? Normally I would not think so, but what I'm experiencing and what I've seen in my testing suggests that it isn't the software. BUT . . .

One thing is certain: I'll never exceed the number of available downloads.

mikeh14

Same issue for me. Paramount+. Speeds start good at the start of a download, then slow into the <100kb/sec range for the last 75% of the download

Cats4U

Running ping and tracert do not show anything unusual
TomdeOldMan

How are you obtaining the CDN address?

Cats4U

Same issue for me. Paramount+. Speeds start good at the start of a download, then slow into the <100kb/sec range for the last 75% of the download
mikeh14

This is totally normal and has been that way since I can remember. The first 50% of the download on Paramount+ is the video and that is measured in MB/s. The second 50% is the audio and that is measured in KB/s. Beginning at 51% you will see the speed start to drop as the slower audio starts to get averaged in with the faster video speed.
Some streamers do it just the opposite in that the audio is downloaded first and the video is second. In those cases, it would appear that it is slow in the beginning and increases in speed throughout the download.
Some streamers download both together and so the speed looks to remain steady throughout.
And finally some streamers will download either audio or video for a full 100% followed by 100% of the other. You will see a steady slow speed for the audio and a steady fast speed for the video with no averaging involved.

TomdeOldMan

How are you obtaining the CDN address?

Cats4U

It took some doing. I started with going after the Roku Channel, but ping would not work and after some work, I realized I was dealing with roku.com. Pinging roku.com got me the IP address and so did tracert. (Windows 10)

Cats4U

I really don't think that your CDN is just Roku.com. It wouldn't be something that simple but I give you high praise for your effort. I've got my hands full with something else right now but sometime later I'll try finding my CDN for an episode of Space1999 on the Roku Channel. It probably won't be your CDN since you live on the West Coast and I live on the East but at least I'll be able to show you (and hopefully everyone else here with slowness problems) how to determine where the slowness is coming from.

jpp72

I really don't think that your CDN is just Roku.com. It wouldn't be something that simple but I give you high praise for your effort. I've got my hands full with something else right now but sometime later I'll try finding my CDN for an episode of Space1999 on the Roku Channel. It probably won't be your CDN since you live on the West Coast and I live on the East but at least I'll be able to show you (and hopefully everyone else here with slowness problems) how to determine where the slowness is coming from.
Cats4U

Ya you're right. That is not really how it works.

The main domain and the CDN are always different. You need to look at the .mpd file to see where the media is being served from.

I just went right now and played the 1st episode of Space 1999 and the .mpd file tells me the CDN is actually vod.delivery.roku.com

It obviously has a different IP address than roku.com because they actually use a bunch of different CDNs.

First time i did an nslookup, it resolved to Akamai.

Second time was Cloudfront:

Third time it was Fastly:

My suggestion to you would be that if you find the CDN you are connecting to is slow then just flush your DNS and try again until it gets faster (if it ever does).

While connected to Fastly, i downloaded S01E01 of 2 Broke Girls 3 times

With yt-dlp native: I got 11 MB/s for the video, 450 KB/s for the audio, 19 KB/s for the subtitles
With yt-dlp aria2c: I got 67 MB/s for the video, 2.8 MB/s for the audio, 105 KB/s for the subtitles
With StreamFab: I got 5 MB/s for the video and 275 KB/s for the audio.

So... Same CDN, 3 different tools, 3 wildly different speeds downloading the same video. Aria2c is the default config and yt-dlp native is 10 connections.

TomdeOldMan

Ya you're right. That is not really how it works.

The main domain and the CDN are always different. You need to look at the .mpd file to see where the media is being served from.

I just went right now and played the 1st episode of Space 1999 and the .mpd file tells me the CDN is actually vod.delivery.roku.com

It obviously has a different IP address than roku.com because they actually use a bunch of different CDNs.

First time i did an nslookup, it resolved to Akamai.

Second time was Cloudfront:

Third time it was Fastly:

My suggestion to you would be that if you find the CDN you are connecting to is slow then just flush your DNS and try again until it gets faster (if it ever does).

So... Same CDN, 3 different tools, 3 wildly different speeds downloading the same video. Aria2c is the default config and yt-dlp native is 10 connections.
jpp72

Thanks for the information on this. I had wondered if the CDN was something else. It's been 25 years since I retired from the computer industry and as such, a lot has happened. This is good information to know.

Thanks again,
Tom

TomdeOldMan

Thanks for the information on this. I had wondered if the CDN was something else. It's been 25 years since I retired from the computer industry and as such, a lot has happened. This is good information to know.

Thanks again,
Tom
TomdeOldMan

Okay, TomdeOldMan stupid guy is back. Where do I find the .mpd file (or CDN) for various streaming sites? In particular, related to this lack of speed thread? Roku, Peacock, Hulu and the ones I have downloaded from recently.

Thanks again.

P.S. Any good reference texts that should be using for these questions?.

TomdeOldMan

Out of curiosity, I just toggled the turbo-speed feature and even after waiting for a while, and then toggling the feature back on, there was no discernable difference in the speed for the download. It was well below 100 kbps.

This is something the programmers need to look at.

MrGrackle

Out of curiosity, I just toggled the turbo-speed feature and even after waiting for a while, and then toggling the feature back on, there was no discernable difference in the speed for the download. It was well below 100 kbps.

This is something the programmers need to look at.
TomdeOldMan

The Turbo Toggle is only for Youtube and should not even be there, it's confusing. It should be for all services.
I have not noticed any difference in speed with Prime. it does vary by time of day.

jpp72

Okay, TomdeOldMan stupid guy is back. Where do I find the .mpd file (or CDN) for various streaming sites? In particular, related to this lack of speed thread? Roku, Peacock, Hulu and the ones I have downloaded from recently.

Thanks again.

P.S. Any good reference texts that should be using for these questions?.
TomdeOldMan

Lol there are no stupid questions when you genuinely don't know.

You can find the .mpd or .m3u8 in the network tab of the developer tools but there are quite a few extensions for browsers that will show that to you.

For FireFox, you can use Stream Detector. It's available for Chrome also but it's not on the Chrome Store so it's not as convenient an install.

For Chrome, Edge, Brave and all other Chromium based browsers, i use these two:

.MPD Detector
Video m3u8 Sniffer

For the m3u8 one, make sure to disable the URL Injection as it is pretty annoying you can't close that on the page where the m3u8 is detected.

I don't know about any reference text really... It's just things you pick up along the way. I guess you could check out the Video Help Forums.

Cats4U

Well, it looks like I don't have to do anything now. Jack has it all covered. I had a major honey-do today and there was no getting around it. Sorry I couldn't have provided more help here today. But as usual Jack provided all the info I would have and then some. Thanks, Jack!