bocastephen

I spoke with someone techie about this, who was willing to setup my Raspberry Pi VPN - but he said the video quality would suffer given it is being piped through the VPN between LA and Florida - so the end result would be video that is no better than the Slingbox I have sitting there now that sends the data as UDP right over the Internet without a tunnel, and that video is often pretty bad.

In order to 'trick' the Xfinity app, I apparently need to be able to spoof the IP of my Xfinity router which is what the app uses to check to see if I am home or outside - and that might be a harder techie thing to pull off on an iPad or Android tablet unless there is a way to do that given I am on wifi behind a ATT Uverse router.

tmiw

Yeah, the VPN's performance in general is going to depend on your upload speed at home. For instance, I pay for 200mbps download and 20mbps upload and even if the hotel or other venue has a much faster connection, I only get 15mbps or so download according to speed tests.

As for video, I'm not sure how Slingbox is encoding video but it's possible that the Xfinity app uses better encoding that allows the same video to be transmitted with less bandwidth. It's worth a shot anyway if you already have the Pi.

nmenaker

I don't really think you'll notice. Even going in and out of your home network, you'll still not saturate the upstream or downstream connection to your florida location. I think the bigger impact could be for people back home on the LAN if the upstream/downstream pipe is constantly sending video traffic outbound.

bocastephen

No one is home or using the internet when I am not there - but the Slingbox video quality is still really bad, so maybe this whole plan is a lost cause

nmenaker

that's odd. the slingbox really only needs a 1mb upload bandwidth to get a full HD resolution, if not the full HD image. The shape is right, but the quality is lowered. With 1.5-2mb its pretty darn sweet. What upload do you have at home and what download do you have at the florida location? I do this all the time around the globe and video quality from the slingbox is very good with just 1mb on both ends.

bocastephen

I'm with Comcast and my upload is about 6-8MB, and when I'm using it from outside home, nothing else is being used on the Internet, but I hardly ever get true HD, and even SD can freeze, pixelate or just stop altogether. I've had Slingbox inspect the connection and verify everything is set correctly, but I just never get a good signal.

Ditto

But bandwidth is not the only concern, latency and jitter are 2 more to consider, east coast to west coast will already be in the range of 80-100ms, and that's not including any added latency/jitter due to potentially poor public/hotel wifi connections.

CatJo

As an aside, those using a Raspberry Pi for PiVPN, also check out Pi-Hole, very good ad-blocker.

josephstern

Interesting. Looks pretty cool. I've been thinking about doing a 1.1.1.1 DNS through my Pi also.

But would I miss the useful ads on FT this way?

CatJo

Not sure if serious Haven't seen any "useful" ads on any site, but then again, I haven't seen ads in quite a long time.

One cool thing about using the Pi-hole is when you VPN into your home network, you effectively remove ads while on a public connection too.

nmenaker

totally true, but with the heaadroom he has and the applications in use, it shouldn't be a problem. Maybe if one was trying to run VOIP back and forth, but a one way buffered video stream shouldn't be impacted as it is. Based on the latest post and slingstreaming not being very good regardless of where he is, it might be that there is some other issue going on.

As I've reported already, I don't see these problems pretty much anywhere I am in the world with decent incoming bandwidth. Even on a PLANE..and that's for the most part either doing VPN to the home or VPN to a USA destination first.

martin_paris

Hi,
you may want to have a look at this : OpenWRT, USB powered, dual band multi RJ45 travel router

As part of the last update you can use one of the hardware button to activate the OpenVPN/PPTP/LT2S VPN back home.

Regards,

Martin

bocastephen

Thank you - I think the easiest answer is Slingbox, which I've figured out is going to be dependent on my download speed, which a VPN is likely going to be worse. I think if I can get Slingbox working on my iPad and can stream it to my regular TV in HD quality, that will be the perfect arrangement.

Finkface

I use a Slingbox to watch hockey games when we are away. I have the app on my ipad and then stream it to the tv. Works great.

KRSW

Slingbox works great. I've been using it for ~10(?) years. A bit laggy, but unless you're switching channels you'll never notice. I have mine set up at a location which has both Comcast & DirecTV and no trouble controlling both.

Although... I think I'd still recommend going with a regular consumer router and ditch the Comcast crappy router. Anything even remotely decent has VPN built in. Asus, TP-Link. I'm sure Netgear & Linksys do as well. I have multiple Asus routers around happily acting as VPN servers for me, no issues.