Reducing latency/buffer on inbound video streaming

[dkwywbicgia]

Hi guys.

I watch lots of live streaming videos and minimising latency is very important to me. Therefore I pay a large premium for a superfast fibre internet connection and use a wired Cat6 connection.

I notice that upon refresh of any stream, its latency can vary by as much as 1 or 2 secs either way. Often if a stream loads with a particularly low latency then after a short time the stream will buffer for a brief moment and revert to the higher latency.

Is there a way that I can disable any buffer in my browser and always keep latency reduced to an absolute minimum? I am happy to trade off a reduction in smoothness or quality, and happy to use any browser or browser settings to achieve this.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[veeg]

Hello

Which browsers are you using? Do you have software that blocks ad’s?

@Rustys

[dkwywbicgia]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I have tried all the mainstream browsers to see which has the least latency but they are all exactly the same and all perform in the same way. I don;t run any ad blocking software. There isn’t a problem with my streams, I want to do tell the browser to minimise quality or smoothness in return for minimum latency. Maybe some setting or browser that allows you to remove stream buffer?

[Rustys]

So other can better assist… Will assist where I can with this. @Evan Omo

With out knowing what you have tried, speeds, browser(s), what is running in the background, from where (Mixer, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook ETC). With the pandemic going on and so many people off there is a lot of more people accessing sites. Some are not able to handle the traffic so they have throttled their service to handle the amount of service.

Are you using a VPN

Have you looked here?

https://www.keycdn.com/support/what-is-latency

Some browsers have some configuration that are not in the Option settings that can be change. Be aware that changing some of them could brick the browser.

[dkwywbicgia]

Thanks for the reply. Yes I have seen that link before. It focuses on how to reduce outbound latency where I am trying to reduce inbound latency.

Perhaps I have not explained myself well. Let me give the following example:
Imagine someone is live streaming a video of their 100% accurate wall-clock on an embedded HTML5 video player which I am streaming via my browser. As their wall-clock is 100% accurate I know exactly the amount of latency between his live video and my monitor. When I refresh the browser window sometimes my inbound stream might be 2 secs behind live, and sometimes it might be 4 secs behind live. There is no change to the outbound stream so this says to me that the latency I experience is impacted by the buffer my browser builds. Is there any setting/browser/software I can use to ensure I always have the lowest possible latency? (ie in this example, 2 secs).

I have tried the following but nothing seems to make any difference:

all the mainstream browsers
several about.config configurations to 0 in Firefox such as [media.cache_readahead_limit] and [media.cache_resume_threshold]
fastest possible fibre internet speed with real 350mbps achieved
NordVPN using virtual networks closest to the stream source
various router settings like dns to 8.8.8.8

[Rustys]

No I fully understood that you were watching videos.

For what you have stated in Post # 5 you have already attempted things that I would of suggested. May just have to wait until @Evan Omo or even jmarket has time to look over the information and answer.

[dkwywbicgia]

OK thanks for your reply

[veeg]

Any updates?

[veeg]

2: Any updates?

[phillpower2]

Thread closed due to lack of feedback from the OP.