Amazon streaming ahhhhhh

[ngrayson]

Hi Guys,

Posting this knowing there is an issue which is frustrating not just me.

I have a BT Homehub 5 BB router with both wifi and fixed Lan. To this I connect my wingate proxy machine which is a dual NIC machine so its standard operating of wingate behind a router. Thus far I have had no issues everything working as it should for attached devices and has been for years.

I have a PS4 which is on the protected side of the Wingate proxy (as is the TV) which runs an Amazon Prime app and I can stream from prime perfectly OK on said PS4.

So bought a new Samsung TV which has built in the Amazon Prime app also. When I fire this up it connects to amazon and presents me with the usual stuff to select whichever video I want. When I tell it to start streamining is when the fun starts. Not a lot happens until it displays a message saying insufficient bandwidth. Hmmm works with the PS4 under the same circumstances.

Since I have a Samsung Bluray play I though I would check that as it also has the amazon app and it behaves the same way. Both are connected to the internet and other functions are oK.

Then tried the TV directly to the BB router on Cat5 bypassing Wingate and it works.

Went onto T'internet and good old google and found references to the problems being DNS related so I looking in the global logs and found these at the exact time I tried to stream.

10225 27/12/2015 11:07:50.107 192.168.0.24 AVuser WWW Proxy server 364 20194 warning 0 Server closed connection prior to completion of transaction - terminating
10229 27/12/2015 11:07:52.072 192.168.0.24 AVuser WWW Proxy server 676 20198 warning 0 Server closed connection prior to completion of transaction - terminating
10233 27/12/2015 11:07:52.836 192.168.0.24 AVuser WWW Proxy server 3220 20202 warning 0 Server closed connection prior to completion of transaction - terminating
It does not matter if I point the Wingate service at the DNS address on the BB router or give it addresses of DNS servers on the internet it still does the same. Whether the BT Homehub is intercepting the DNS requests or not I have no idea and I cannot point the Homehub to anything other than the BT DNS servers as BT don't allow it unless you are a business customer.

Have you guys come across this issue? I'm hoping that you have and have some answers that may help (getting a little earache from certain quarters). I can provide wireshark traces of both the Samsung and PS4 at the point you ask it to stream if that helps.

It seems the Samsung devices behave differently to the Sony device however its not just Samsung. A number of new smartTV owners are experiencing these issues behind proxy servers.

[adrien]

Hi

Are you using Kasperky AV? This will reduce the bandwidth to the client if it's scanning the stream. You'd need to whitelist the site/URL or content type for scanning in the Kaspersky AV settings.

Adrien

[ngrayson]

Hi Adrien,

Sorry for the delay. I managed to lock myself out of my account. I had not realised the forum uses different login details to my actual account and the forum password reset was directed to an old email address from my old ISP. Managed to resolve that.

Yes I am using Kaspersky but I don't really believe its a bandwidth issue. the TV and my PS4 are connected to the same switch that is connected to Wingate and the PS4 has no issues at all. Also under Kaspersky I have exceptions of image/* , Video/* and audio/* so I would have thought they would not be scanned. Its difficult to ad a specific site for Amazon because the stream appears to come from a differing host I.e. they don't have one which make sense as you should stream from the edge of the network not through the core.

My broadband is 40M and Wingate is running on a quad core AMD processor with 4G of Ram and its doing nothing else so I also don't think its process or memory bound. Why does the PS4 work?

There is definitely a difference in the DNS behaviour between the PS4 Amazon app and the samsung so I about to ask a really dumb question. I know I can disable the DNS service on wingate but what about the client? I want to try to disable all DNS on Wingate and add an hole for port 53 so that DNS goes directly to my broadband router. Can this be done?

- Neil

[adrien]

Hi

it's possible the stream is being served with some other content type that isn't matching any of your exclusions.

You can log content type in usage logging, add the field to log the Content-Type response header.

Or you can check KAV for WG logs to see if the stream is being scanned, if it is, then KAV for WG will reduce bandwidth to the client by 25% as it drip-feeds the data through to the client whilst accumulating it for a scan.

Adrien

[ngrayson]

Hi Adrien,

Its not quit so simple as the stream being scanned which explains why the PS4 works.

My initial line of investigation was simply to put a wildcard exclusion on Kaspersky effectively making it pass all and sure enough the problem disappeared. I then looked at the logs and included what appeared to be the sites associated with the streaming elements of the exchange and added those sites to exclusion list at the same time removing the wildcard. This broke it again so I re-added the wildcard and started to watch a film during which I removed the wildcard and the film was unaffected.

I figured there was something earlier in the session I had missed so I looked at the whole transaction right from starting the application and as some point there was a reference to http://services.wmdrm.windowsmedia.com/SecureClock which i had assumed was one of the Samsung background processes but none the less I added this to the white list. The problem is now resolved as a result of this exclusion although I still dont understand how Kaspersky was affecting this. I can only presume that its a challenge - response and its timing out as a result of the scanning.

None the less anyone else who has experienced this should try this technique.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Adiren.
- Neil

[adrien]

thanks for that, I wonder if the delay introduced by spooling and scanning that clock resource messed things up.

Adrien

[ngrayson]

Just done a bit of research into what its about and since Kaspersky wont modify the packet exchange it can only be down to timing.

I still don't understand why the PS4 and TV behave differently but since its now resolved and my earache has stopped I'm not too concerned. Maybe when I get a little more time I will dig deeper.

-Neil