How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

[redwein]

Does anybody know how much downloading one of these does when you aren't watching or specifically downloading a move?

I just got my first box hooked up today and it is a big hit with the family. I just ordered one for my dad (he lives next door but uses my network via a wireless bridge) and I plan to add 2 more at my house for a total of 4 boxes on my network. I have both DSL/6 Mbps and Cable Modem/8 Mbps combined using a load balancing router. I'm hoping that between the 4 boxes they don't suck up all of my bandwidth while I'm not even watching movies.

[Nded]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

Does anybody know how much downloading one of these does when you aren't watching or specifically downloading a move?

I just got my first box hooked up today and it is a big hit with the family. I just ordered one for my dad (he lives next door but uses my network via a wireless bridge) and I plan to add 2 more at my house for a total of 4 boxes on my network. I have both DSL/6 Mbps and Cable Modem/8 Mbps combined using a load balancing router. I'm hoping that between the 4 boxes they don't suck up all of my bandwidth while I'm not even watching movies.

The background traffic is fairly light, however if I were in your hypothetical shoes, I would enable "Nice to Network" on you Vudu's when they were not actively streaming a movie. This will cut the Vudu's bandwidth consumption by half (or more), making it feasiable to have 4 your LAN without much of an impact at all. You could probably leave at least your main theater one on "full speed" if it get's a lot of instant gratification traffic. Remember, after the show downloads to the hard drive (rent or purchase), there is no need to even be connected to the internet. It's possible you have enough bandwidth to keep them all on full speed, but it's nice to know the Vudu gives you a throttle.

Another alternative would be to use some intelligent QOS settings. With any luck your load balancing router will allow you to prioritize your traffic in such a way that you won't even notice the Vudus impact. If not, you will find that many of us Vudu nuts are using routers with Tomato firmware that let's us enjoy our Vudu while keeping our preferred network traffic in the front of the queue.

FYI, the "Nice to Network" setting cuts your bandwidth usage in half (i.e. instead of being able to watch a 2 hour movie instantly, you would expect about a 1 hour delay before starting to watch the show). If you can convince the watchers in the other rooms to get used to selecting their movie before dinner, and watching it afterwards, they will not even realize what you've done to manage your bandwidth.

[mbustin]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

If I keep the reduced network usage option enabled, and then decide to watch a movie and change the option to full usage - will it take effect immediately and let me watch the movie immediately?

[Greg]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

If I keep the reduced network usage option enabled, and then decide to watch a movie and change the option to full usage - will it take effect immediately and let me watch the movie immediately?

It depends. In general, if you have 3Mbps down or more, it's better to not flip the switch back and forth, as the box tries to "learn" about your network connection's abilities to provide you with instant access, so if you flip flop that switch too often, it will have a less than ideal time to settle on a good assessment.

The box's background traffic is designed to be non-intrusive on 3Mbps (or higher) networks. The general background traffic is about 100kbps, but it can increase to about 600kbps down and 250kbps up (note that these figures are approximations and can vary based on a lot of factors, but it gives you an idea) for some periods of time, depending on what the box is doing.

For instance, when you get a box from a store/warehouse, and you just plug it in, it will try and play "catch up" with the rest of the network to get the latest movies/software, etc... so you will see more traffic in the first few days/weeks of ownership.

Hope this helps.

-- Greg

[redwein]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

That sounds reasonable and I think I can keep my boxes on full speed mode all the time since we generally wouldn't be watching movies from multiple boxes simultaneously. It does sound like I should stage the addition of the other boxes though, letting each one "catch up" before adding the next. I can see my first one hitting the network pretty constantly (though not too heavily) since I plugged it in yesterday.

BTW, having the 2 broadband connections and the load balancing router seems like an ideal configuration for this. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to share my experiences with finding a router that works well for this.

[NA9D]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

Greg is the Vudu networking genius and he and I have sent many, many messages on this topic. His word is as good as gold. I've challenged his conclusions many times and he's always been right!

I just upgraded to an 8 Mb/1 Mb service (Comcast Business). The primary reason was to support the Vudu. And it clips along great. The background upload/download is really not very noticeable. The downloads sometimes burst up to 1 or 2 Mb/sec but it's fairly short. The uploads are pretty consistent around 100 kbps to 200 kbps and sometimes do go higher.

QoS on your router will help the most...What would be best would be to give the downstream Vudu traffic the top priority and the upstream the bulk or bottom priority...

[mbustin]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

Thanks for the advice! I'll leave the settings alone

[redwein]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

QoS on your router will help the most...What would be best would be to give the downstream Vudu traffic the top priority and the upstream the bulk or bottom priority...

So what is going on in the upstream? Is it a file sharing mechanism and my box is providing chunks of files to other boxes? If so, would me setting the QoS to low priority for upstream make others' dowonloads slower? Also, if one box provides content for another, I wonder if it would be smart enough to get content from other boxes on the same lan first, before going outside.

[NA9D]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

So what is going on in the upstream? Is it a file sharing mechanism and my box is providing chunks of files to other boxes? If so, would me setting the QoS to low priority for upstream make others' dowonloads slower? Also, if one box provides content for another, I wonder if it would be smart enough to get content from other boxes on the same lan first, before going outside.

In a word, yes. One of the ways the "Instant" function works so well is that nothing is reliant upon any one server. In terms of limiting via QoS, it probably wouldn't make much difference. The bulk priority in QoS only is going to come into play if you've max'd out your upstream for some reason. However, you probably won't do that but with multiple boxes on the LAN, you might...still while I don't know all the details of the protocol, I do know that it is smart enough to not rely too much on any single peer.

In terms of being able to pull content from other boxes on the LAN first, that's a good question. I don't know and I also don't know how it would work in general. All of us who have been testing this have so far just had one box to play with. But you raise a very valid point...

Maybe Greg can chime in on this...

[MaxH]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

redwein, you bring up a very interesting point. Let's say you had 4 boxes at home. I'm not sure if the system is set up to handle that as 4 possible boxes from which to download, or if it would take into account that the 4 boxes are connected to 1 WAN IP address, and it would treat them as one possible download source. I would think it should treat it as the latter, to be fair, but I don't know if this has come up yet, so it may not be part of the way the system works. This is definitely something they will need to address, though, as people begin to buy multiple units for one residence.

[redwein]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

Well it can't be by WAN IP address since many, if not most people use DHCP to get their addresses so they aren't stable. I'm guessing it would see each box as a completely independent unit and would attempt to grab data from each of them accordingly. I'm not sure how feasible it is to do anything different but we will see.

I hope it doesn't come to it but I wonder if Comcast would sell me another connection. I have one more WAN port in my router.

[mbustin]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

So do you need a different account for each box? (I was too lazy to browse all the other threads )

[redwein]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

I'm assuming not. If someone can answer with certainty, please do.

[Nded]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

You can activate multiple boxes under one account. Or if you prefer, you can create an account for each box (OK kids, you only get $x per month for movies on this box, and I'm keeping my eye on it). I don't know if the account history (purchase/rental) can be sorted by box (yet).

[MaxH]

Re: How Much Bandwidth is Used For Backgroud Downloads

Well it can't be by WAN IP address since many, if not most people use DHCP to get their addresses so they aren't stable. I'm guessing it would see each box as a completely independent unit and would attempt to grab data from each of them accordingly. I'm not sure how feasible it is to do anything different but we will see.

I hope it doesn't come to it but I wonder if Comcast would sell me another connection. I have one more WAN port in my router.

Yes, but as soon as your WAN IP address changes, it changes for all boxes, and all packets from those boxes would immediately have the new IP address. But it might be more useful if the backend just knew that boxes 4723, 4724, 4725, and 4276 were all on your account, and so treated them as one source from which to download. Then again, if you bought a box for a family member and paid all their expenses (I wouldn't, but I know people who are billed directly for family members' expenses), they should be treated as separate sources, so I'd think WAN IP would be the best way to go, if it's necessary at all.

Remember, this is just spitballing, I don't work for VUDU. But I've seen other systems try to track how many accounts/devices people have.