# Slow download speed from DVR



## elter (Jun 14, 2016)

Hi all, 

So, I have Bolt 1TB connected to Moca from FIOS Quantum GW with default settings. It's Moca 2.0, PHY rate 600/400 or smth like this, no errors on the interface in the stats.

And I have a mobile phone connected to 5G Wifi from that Fios GW. about 600Mb/s link speed. It's working just fine, I get full internet speed 100/100Mbits/sec from public internet with no problems. The problem is when I try to download a recorded TV show from TiVo, it's super slow. The download rate is about 5Mbits/per seconds, it it takes 20+ minutes to download 1.1Gb show. 

Any ideas what to check here? I can certainly try and connect Tivo via ethernet to the router, in addition to MoCa network for the TV part. But I'd like to figure out what's wrong with existing connection.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

elter said:


> Hi all,
> 
> So, I have Bolt 1TB connected to Moca from FIOS Quantum GW with default settings. It's Moca 2.0, PHY rate 600/400 or smth like this, no errors on the interface in the stats.
> 
> ...


I see the same thing from my GFs crappy FiOS supplied router. When I plugged in an Asus router to test, there were no issues with speed. I still haven't figured out why the FIOS router has problems. I dusted off the new one I got earlier this year from FIOS to try at her house and had the same crappy results.

there is a reason why I have five or six FiOS supplied routers gathering dust in my closet. I would replace the one my GF has with an Asus but she didn't want me to. So until she needs to do a bunch of transfers she will be fine with it.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

I think OP is talking about downloading a show to a phone via the Bolt built in Stream. The reason that's slow is there is on the fly transcoding to H.264 happening, not just a simple network transfer. It gets even worse if downloading away from home since the way TiVo does it goes through a proxy server which really limits the transfer speed no matter how good your home internet upload speed may be.

i.e. In case of OP most likely the bottleneck is how fast the Bolt internal Stream can transcode, not any local network issues.


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## elter (Jun 14, 2016)

Thank you for the feedback. Do you see similar transfer / transcoding speed on your devices?


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

moyekj said:


> I think OP is talking about downloading a show to a phone via the Bolt built in Stream. The reason that's slow is there is on the fly transcoding to H.264 happening, not just a simple network transfer. It gets even worse if downloading away from home since the way TiVo does it goes through a proxy server which really limits the transfer speed no matter how good your home internet upload speed may be.
> 
> i.e. In case of OP most likely the bottleneck is how fast the Bolt internal Stream can transcode, not any local network issues.


If that's the case then 5mb/s is way too slow. It should be downloading at least at twice realtime speed.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

Don't have a Bolt, but the Roamio internal Stream and standalone Stream for in home streaming do only about 5 Mbps:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=511445
Out of home is even worse due to proxy server - under 2 Mbps.

Don't know about the Bolt one, but from everything I've seen about thus far it seems mostly inferior in every way to the Roamio internal Stream chip so doubt it's much faster.

Note that the bit rates the videos are transcoded to are only 1-2 Mbps, so 5 Mbps downloads is still much faster than real time.


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## Steve (Apr 24, 2003)

FWIW, I'm seeing about 49 minutes to download a 62 minute Bolt HD recording of _Chopped _via cellular to my iPhone.

Basic quality. I'm on T-Mobile, 3 bars of signal (out of 5).

File is estimated to be 549MB, so that works out to about 1.5 mbps, if I did the math right.


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## elter (Jun 14, 2016)

Ok, so it's look like 5-6Mbits for in home download is probably the way it should be. 

I'm wondering if I could download several shows at a time... Ie, I'm not sure how many stream Bolt can produce in parallel, without transcoding performance hit.


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## moyekj (Jan 24, 2006)

elter said:


> Ok, so it's look like 5-6Mbits for in home download is probably the way it should be.
> 
> I'm wondering if I could download several shows at a time... Ie, I'm not sure how many stream Bolt can produce in parallel, without transcoding performance hit.


The Bolt can only do 2 at a time in parallel, vs the Roamio being able to do 4. But to get 2 in parallel you would need 2 different client devices since if you queue them up from 1 device they will be handled sequentially.


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## Steve (Apr 24, 2003)

Steve said:


> FWIW, I'm seeing about 49 minutes to download a 62 minute Bolt HD recording of _Chopped _via cellular to my iPhone.
> 
> Basic quality. I'm on T-Mobile, 3 bars of signal (out of 5).
> 
> File is estimated to be 549MB, so that works out to about 1.5 mbps, if I did the math right.


What's interesting is downloading that same episode over wifi at home is estimated to take 44 minutes, still only about 1.7 mbps.

I'm surprised because we _regularly _use an iPad as our kitchen table TV and never experience any streaming delays. Sitting at the iPad provides a similar viewing experience to sitting at the Bolt. 30-seconds skips are almost instantaneous, so real-time streaming must get a higher CPU priority than downloading.

*EDITED TO ADD:* I was down in my basement, about as far away from my wifi router as I can be, when I first posted. I just re-tried that same wifi download closer to the router, and it was only estimated to take 20 minutes, so about 3.5 mbps.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Steve said:


> What's interesting is downloading that same episode over wifi at home is estimated to take 44 minutes, still only about 1.7 mbps.
> 
> I'm surprised because we regularly use an iPad as our kitchen table TV and never experience any streaming delays. Sitting at the iPad provides a similar viewing experience to sitting at the Bolt. 30-seconds skips are almost instantaneous, so real-time streaming must get a higher CPU priority than downloading.
> 
> EDITED TO ADD: I was down in my basement, about as far away from my wifi router as I can be, when I first posted. I just re-tried that same wifi download closer to the router, and it was only estimated to take 20 minutes, so about 3.5 mbps.


Those speeds are definitely slow. I downloaded an hour long HD show(around 450MB) on my cellphone today as a test and it took around 23 minutes. Right now I'm downloading a 30 minute HD show(around 220MB) on my tablet and the initial estimate time was around 12 minutes.


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## Steve (Apr 24, 2003)

aaronwt said:


> Those speeds are definitely slow. I downloaded an hour long HD show(around 450MB) on my cellphone today as a test and it took around 23 minutes.


Definitely slower. Yours works out to about 2.67 mbps, vs. my 1.5 mbps. I wonder if I'm slower because of T-Mobile? That Bolt was also recording a couple of shows at the time. I will retry when I'm sure it's otherwise idle.



> Right now I'm downloading a 30 minute HD show(around 220MB) on my tablet and the initial estimate time was around 12 minutes.


So about 2.5 Mbps. That wifi or cellular? If wifi, that's slower than my second wifi try, sitting closer to my router.


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## Steve (Apr 24, 2003)

FWIW, I just tried cellular again. Neither of my Bolts are recording anything. The Bolt downloading the _Chopped _episode (@1.8mbps) is connected Moca. The Bolt downloading the _Late Show _episode (@2mbps) is my gateway Bolt, connected ethernet. As you can see, my T-Mobile cellular data speeds aren't bad.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

One thing I did notice when I was downloading over WiFi tonight was the temperature of the Bolt. Usually it's around the upper 50's Celsius to lower 60's Celsius. But while sending the content to the tablet the temp got up to 70C.


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## Steve (Apr 24, 2003)

aaronwt said:


> One thing I did notice when I was downloading over WiFi tonight was the temperature of the Bolt. Usually it's around the upper 50's Celsius to lower 60's Celsius. But while sending the content to the tablet the temp got up to 70C.


My 500GB Bolt sits on an open shelf. It "woke up" at 61. Peaked at 67-68 on both cellular and wifi download, after about 10% complete.


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## jesrush (Nov 7, 2015)

elter said:


> Hi all,
> 
> The download rate is about 5Mbits/per seconds, it it takes 20+ minutes to download 1.1Gb show.


This is well within normal transfer speeds for a typical 1-3 year old 1x1 802.11n smartphone. With only one antenna in the phone, there is only so much data that can be pushed.

To prove that the issue is not with your Tivo or your network, just connect a 2x2 device (iphone 6, ipad air, for example) and you'll see 30-40% faster transfer speeds.


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## elter (Jun 14, 2016)

jesrush said:


> This is well within normal transfer speeds for a typical 1-3 year old 1x1 802.11n smartphone. With only one antenna in the phone, there is only so much data that can be pushed.
> 
> To prove that the issue is not with your Tivo or your network, just connect a 2x2 device (iphone 6, ipad air, for example) and you'll see 30-40% faster transfer speeds.


For the sake of correctness...

I actually highlighted my first post that the phone was connected at 600Mbit/sec link speed, which would give you about 250Mbit/sec of actual throughput. It's a 2x2 ac phone. Also, 1x1 even on 802.11g can give you 15-20Mbit/sec with no problems if you signal is strong.


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## compnurd (Oct 6, 2011)

Sorry to revive this.. But i noticed this today also.. While unloading about 25 kids shows to my daughters ipad(new gen) I am noticing on my Bolt + it is also a 1:1 speed ratio. Basically a 30 min show is taking 30 min to transfer(310MB). I seem to remember it taking about half that time on a stand alone tivo stream. I doubt it is the network speed as it is downloading shows from my directv box/app at around 12mb/sec and speedtests at 300mb plus also(isp max speed) I am almost tempted to find a standalone stream


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## Phoibos (Jan 1, 2018)

compnurd said:


> Sorry to revive this.. But i noticed this today also.. While unloading about 25 kids shows to my daughters ipad(new gen) I am noticing on my Bolt + it is also a 1:1 speed ratio. Basically a 30 min show is taking 30 min to transfer(310MB). I seem to remember it taking about half that time on a stand alone tivo stream. I doubt it is the network speed as it is downloading shows from my directv box/app at around 12mb/sec and speedtests at 300mb plus also(isp max speed) I am almost tempted to find a standalone stream


This has been bugging be with the standalone stream and I had hoped the Bolt would be an improvement. Sadly, it is not. But the download speed is clearly limited primarily by the transcoding. I have just tried 3 downloads of the same episode of the "Librarians" (1h HD) at different quality settings. Downloading with an iPhone X over an AC WiFi network that can easily stream 75 Mbs. 
At Basic quality about 475 MB, at HD quality about 1.2 GB, and Normal quality around 700 MB. Turns out that at each setting, the download takes about the same time (around 28 minutes). It appears that the download speed really is limited by the Bolt's ability to transcode and push the data onto the network as it almost triples in speed when HD quality is selected. While there's more data to push, there's less to compress, resulting in a net "draw." (In fact, the HD download appears to be a tiny little bit faster.)
So, since I have enough storage, I'll now download HD quality as there's no benefit for me to now doing it. But I'm still disappointed by the performance. While I understand that this is not the primary business focus of TiVo, it would have been nice if they had given us a performance boost.


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## chicagobrownblue (May 29, 2008)

jesrush said:


> This is well within normal transfer speeds for a typical 1-3 year old 1x1 802.11n smartphone. With only one antenna in the phone,


A friend of mine is having slow download speeds to his Samsung Galaxy S7. Do you know how many WiFi antennas it has?


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