Choppy Playback When Remote Viewing

[chuck715]

I know there are tons of posts about choppy playback on NVR’s but I could not find one specifically addressing my situation. I apologize if this topic has been covered. So, here goes. I am running an NV4416E-AI NVR with 4 bullet and 1 PTZ cameras. All the fixed cameras are set for 4K, the PTZ is 1080P. I am networked to a Comcast Business class router that can support up to 1 Gbps download and 200 Mbps upload although my plan only is supposed to provide 100 Mbps down and 25 Mbps up. Everything works fine, records locally to disk, local playback of both Live and Playback is totally smooth and fine. When I copy a video file from the NVR to my PC as an MP4, it plays back fine. My choppy-ness only occurs when remote viewing over the internet. Does not matter if it’s a live view or a playback. It doesn’t matter how many channels I view, each is choppy. I have deleted cameras on the NVR down to only one camera on the lowest resolution and bitrate and still get choppiness on remote playback. When I run the Windows task manager on my PC and stream 1 camera, I see about 1.5-2 Mbps coming over the ethernet from the web. When I stream 2 cameras, it jumps to about 3-3.5 Mbps and with 3 cameras it jumps to around 4-5 Mbps. None of these speeds come close to my 25 Mbps upload speed my NVR router is supposed to have. When I ran local speed tests from my phone when connected locally to the NVR network, I was able to consistently get 18-20 Mbps upload speed, so I am confident that is not the bottleneck. It just seems like the NVR is dividing up its outgoing bandwidth and limiting each channel to about 2 Mbps. So even after removing all but one camera, I still could never get more than 2Mbps for one camera stream even the sub stream. Just seems really weird. I would like to understand how the NVR controls its playback bandwidth going out to the ethernet. If I was maxing out my upload speed, I could blame the router but I’m not seeing that. Any advice or insight would be appreciated.

[chuck715]

As a follow up to my initial post, I opened a ticket with Amcrest to look into this issue and they connected to my NVR and saw the same issue of choppy hesitating live and playback video. This is with just one camera substream of less than 1 Mbps bitrate. They basically had no answer for me. I was going to just conclude that the NVR just was not up to the task of remote viewing outside of the local area network. So, I ask the question, does everyone remote viewing their NVR have this same issue? It just seems so weird that I would be the only one in the universe to have this issue. I have good connection and speed from end to end but still cannot get a smooth remote stream of video from my NVR. If this is just a fact of life for the Amcrest NVR landscape, I would be unhappy but at least I would understand that it wasn't my configuration or keep beating my head against the wall trying to figure out why.

[Pogo]

If using Smart Codec try disabling it. Also try using h264 instead of h265 (if you are) or either of the h+ options.