Hey all,
Hitting some issues with buffering and speed drops I'm hoping someone might be able to give some insight with.
Running speed tests on my setup (Shield, VPN, wired connection [and wireless]) I get a solid +60 Mbps dl and <30ms ping. Ul was somewhere in or around 10 Mbps.
When I run the in app test on Smarters (set to Hardware) it suddenly drops to <5 Mbps dl and +70ms ping (~4Mbps ul) with all of the buffering you'd expect at those types of speeds. Same buffering happening on Tivimate, but haven't tried any other apps yet.
A quick search throws up a few mentions of ISPs throttling specific apps where a VPN might help workaround, but this is happening through a VPN and with an ISP that sells itself as a streaming solution so not sure they'd aim to throttle an app like Smarters.
No issues with 4k movies through Seren or anything outside of the IPTV, so seems a rather niche issue for IPTV. Chatting to other users of my IPTV provider it doesn't appear to be anything hitting multiple customers.
Lots of troubleshooting to try and things to test, but can't for the life of me figure out why it might be happening so not so confident of figuring it out blindly. If anyone has any thoughts on why it might be happening or things to try on resolving it please do throw them at me.
Edit: Further details given in reply below.
If anyone stumbles across this with a similar problem it seems to be occurring on my side due to the VPN server selected. Speeds being fine in Analiti or browser tests, but then dropping off a cliff in-app. Some messing with a few dozen servers and I found a couple that work consistently.