Typical download speeds??

tilu3303

A few weeks ago I downloaded a Telenovela from Amazon and I was reaching my download limit of 100 episodes in under 8 hours - about 12 episodes per hour. I discovered a couple days ago that I hadn't selected subtitles to be included, so I'm going through the exercise of re-downloading the series. This time around I'm noticing I'm only getting about 3-4 episodes downloaded per hour. I can't believe adding subtitles could be making that much of a difference so I'm curious if there are other factors that could be affecting how long it's taking?

My StreamFabTemp folder is on an M.2 SSD drive and even though I'm paying for 1.2 Gbps downloads I'm seeing SpeedTest scores of about 700Mbps download.

october262

A few weeks ago I downloaded a Telenovela from Amazon and I was reaching my download limit of 100 episodes in under 8 hours - about 12 episodes per hour. I discovered a couple days ago that I hadn't selected subtitles to be included, so I'm going through the exercise of re-downloading the series. This time around I'm noticing I'm only getting about 3-4 episodes downloaded per hour. I can't believe adding subtitles could be making that much of a difference so I'm curious if there are other factors that could be affecting how long it's taking?

My StreamFabTemp folder is on an M.2 SSD drive and even though I'm paying for 1.2 Gbps downloads I'm seeing SpeedTest scores of about 700Mbps download.
tilu3303

remuxing the subtitles into the video can take some time.

tilu3303

remuxing the subtitles into the video can take some time.
october262

That's an unexpected answer because I often use ffmpeg in a batch file to add .srt files to .mp4 and .mkv files and it usually takes less than a minute to remux single language subtitles into a 2-hour movie.

Reference batch script:

for %%i in (*.mp4) do ffmpeg -i "%%i" -f srt -i "%%~ni.srt" -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s mov_text "%%~ni_txt.mp4"

Germania

If you add a StreamFab.log or check it yourself, you can see
how long the analysis, download and remuxing took

[quote=Germania;n456355]this may not be the best timing.
I can well imagine that more users are on the move at the moment
because of the X-mas holidays.[/quote]

Stan001

I noticed you said temp file is on SSD. Is that also where the downloads go?
I have my downloads go to a Hard drive and see little speed impact, so setting it to an SSD it should even be better.

Lately I don't do long movies, so can't say I do shows between 20 and 30 minutes and see no issue. But maybe it can be slower a little for 2-hour+ movies.
You could do the srt separate and use your script you claim to have to add the srt to the movie after downloading all.

SF uses ffmpeg so not sure what to say. Assuming you have SF set to either mp4 or mkv (ffmpeg)

As for downloading as a whole, speed will highly fluctuate depending on time, day and other factors. I have gig+ speed still and never see blazing speeds when downloading from SF.
But I can say if I do speed test, they all say I am using 100% of my max download speed while doing the speed test. There are times I get over 100% of my download speed doing speed tests.
But when it comes to the streamers and SF, I don't know if I ever saw huge speed gains. There are times I found for some unknown reason it's SF itself as if I tried other methods I got faster speeds. But then you have to go through the mess of having python and python scripts and N_m3u8DL-RE to not only get the streams but the keys.

And I only managed the not so popular providers like tubi, pluto and roku channel. I stopped that now if SF don't get it I don't need it.

MrKrawk

I noticed you said temp file is on SSD. Is that also where the downloads go?
I have my downloads go to a Hard drive and see little speed impact, so setting it to an SSD it should even be better.
Stan001

The program (unless recently fixed) hammers the hard drive hardcore when downloading. That is why I use an SSD as the temp download folder.
And if you download from a fast site such as Peacock, I would expect a traditional hard drive to slow you down if you have a very fast connection as they serve you with upwards of 300 MB/s. Yup, megaBYTES per sec, not bits.

Stan001

I may not have explained it properly. I do have SF temp and cache etc on my main drive, which is a Nvme SSD. The only folder I change is the final download folder to my 3.0+ USB external hard drive.
I did at one time have the final download folder on a 550MB/s read/write SSD, but the size is only 1TB, and I am out of money to upgrade to a 4TB or maybe 8TB SSD.

It was my impression SF did all or most work on the temp drive, and then the final file was copied to where you tell it to put downloads. So it should not impact my performance, setting the download to the 3.0+ USB external Hard Drive. Now it might be it is, but since I can't upgrade the size of the SSD, do to money issues, I will have to deal with it.

tilu3303

Yes, I'm using a 1TB NVME SSD drive for my StreamFabTemp folder because downloading hundreds of Olympics programs from Peacock for later viewing hammered a 10TB HDD to death (yes - the head mechanism actually failed!). SF's Peacock downloader actually physically writes all the tiny segments to disk before concatenating them, whereas it appears most other services have the small segments saved and combined in RAM.

I've always had the final downloaded files saved to a different 10TB HDD over the home network (gigabit wired) with a small impact on network transfer rates.

BTW, I just started downloading some Eight is Enough episodes from Roku and am seeing very slow download speeds of about 500 KB/s, which is right about real time for the 480p show. No failures - any idea what might be happening there?

october262

Yes, I'm using a 1TB NVME SSD drive for my StreamFabTemp folder because downloading hundreds of Olympics programs from Peacock for later viewing hammered a 10TB HDD to death (yes - the head mechanism actually failed!). SF's Peacock downloader actually physically writes all the tiny segments to disk before concatenating them, whereas it appears most other services have the small segments saved and combined in RAM.

I've always had the final downloaded files saved to a different 10TB HDD over the home network (gigabit wired) with a small impact on network transfer rates.

BTW, I just started downloading some Eight is Enough episodes from Roku and am seeing very slow download speeds of about 500 KB/s, which is right about real time for the 480p show. No failures - any idea what might be happening there?
tilu3303

has your ISP throttled your data ??

might try downloading at different times a day and see if that makes a difference.

tilu3303

has your ISP throttled your data ??

might try downloading at different times a day and see if that makes a difference.
october262

I've been downloading from Roku and Tubi and my Total Speed has been running between 20 KB/s and 500 KB/s during downloads. At the same time I'm getting SpeedTest scores of 750+ MB/s. I just stopped a Tubi download that was running around 20 KB/s and started a download from ViX which is running between 10 MB/s and 20 MB/s.

It definitely feels like throttling has happened, but I don't know who would be doing it. When I'm watching without downloading everything plays fine and I do a lot of 30 second skips forward and back and dragging right and left on the progress bar without such indication. It makes me wonder if the throttling could be happening within SF.

Kevlar

Are you using a VPN? Sometimes VPNs can slow you down a bit.

tilu3303

No VPN.

Downloading at 20 KB/s from Tubi, I simply shut down Handbrake which had been working on a long queue of encodes and immediately the download speed increased to 150+ KB/s and stayed there. I've since restarted the Handbrake queue and did not see a correlating drop in speed. StreamFab and Handbrake each share ffmpeg, so I'm guessing they may not be sharing nicely unless StreamFab gets there first. Handbrake doesn't seem to be any faster or slower regardless, so maybe I'll just try pausing the queue when starting SF.

Edit: Well, pausing the Handbrake queue definitely did not help. It seems Handbrake has to be closed altogether to get the boost in SF downloads from certain streams. I just had not noticed any dropoff at all when downloading Olympics events from Peacock several months back, so it seems Roku and Tubi are most affected by having Handbrake running concurrently. I might try using an older PC that's not being used for encoding to do the downloads.

Germania

I've been downloading from Roku and Tubi and my Total Speed has been running between 20 KB/s and 500 KB/s during downloads.
tilu3303

see also: Tubi - Slow downloads

[quote=Germania;n450713]Many providers are slow in SF when more than a thousand segments are downloaded.

With Tubi (which I can only use with vpn) the video was in the MB/s range
but audio (with twice as many segments) was in the kB/s range.
The manual download is much faster, if only because each segment is
downloaded one after the other - manually I download 5-15 at a time.[/quote]

But i'm afraid the "Number of fragments of a dash/hlsnative video that should be download concurrently" is 1
Germania

Stan001

I know Roku channel always seemed slow to where I don't get much, usually find the same or similar content on other providers.
Some days Tubi comes at a good speed, other days/times it doesn't.
Sadly it's been awhile, but I did tests on Pluto and Tubi using other means and the stuff came pretty good speed, I never tried Roku via other means.
I kind of interpreted that as for some reason SF uses a slower way to get some items or maybe only uses one connection whereas other means can use more than one.
One name was concurrent-downloads, others call it simultaneous connections.
Although I guess it could more easily get SF blocked, but then again they are free W/Ads services.
One would think SF uses aria2c as it's in with all the programs it installs, which is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility.