Streaming video while playing games

[Corey]

Tonight my niece was visiting and she was streaming video on her tablet while i was playing world of tanks. I noticed it was lagging me out in game raising my ping to 600-999. Is there a way to stop it from lagging my internet connection like that? I recently purchased a dual band router the cisco e4200 and I usually get around 12-15mbs dl speed and 2mbs upload.

 

I think i saw an article saying I could set up a second SSID for people to use, but I wasn't sure if this would solve the problem of stopping high ping issues while streaming. If there are any settings I could tweak in the router let me know. Thanks!!!

Edited November 10, 2012 by Corey

[EmtHipple]

this happens to me a lot a work and the only way around it I have found was to hard wire in to the router seemed to make the most difference but I could be wrong not an IT guy by any stretch

[RedBaird]

Supposedly, you can set the router to give preference to one MAC over others. Check your manual.

 

Your niece may then complain about your suddenly, to her, crappy Internet service.

[ajnl]

Yes, you can make a second SSID. I think the E4200 comes with two SSIDs default doesn't it? One at 5GHz and one at 2.4GHz? But anyways, just hide the one that you want to use for yourself and limit the amount the other SSID can use. Also if your laptop can't handle 5GHz, you'll have to make the one that is 5GHz into 2.4GHz. You can also make your computer have priority on the network.

 

Its weird that you would get 600ms though, because my sister is able to stream Netflix while I am on WoT and the ms is fine.

[SunLight]

If the problem is upload, then you can certainly solve it.

 

I think most routers have Linux inside, so to speak, so using commands like tc, and maybe iptables with mark options, you can make a queue with priorities and reserve some bandwidth for your ip alone, and/or make it higher priority, so when a packet comes from your pc it will pass first

 

Probably you can do some QoS stuff from your router's interface, of course that is not even close to the power of commands like tc, for example in my router I can't do much with the gui from the browser, so when I share internet I connect to the router via ssh and I have a script with some tc and iptables commands to give some oxygen to my ip address and penalize others .

 

The big problem lies in the downloads, though, because it's hard (at least for me, maybe someone has a tip for this) to tell websites not to flood all your bandwidth with stuff.

You can limit incoming bandwidth in your router for an ip, so it will 'think' there is less bandwidth available, and wait a bit before requesting more stuff, but it doesn't do wonders.

That's because when you open multiple connections to remote servers (i.e. browsing) those servers can easily flood the queue, so to speak, and all the packets meant for your gaming pc have to wait. I still haven't found a solution for this, other than physically killing who is sharing the internet (joking). I even tried to delay the upload rate of their SYN and ACK packets, but that sort of kills their connection and they can't even browse anymore.

 

Check if your router has QoS, otherwise you can connect to it using a terminal (putty is good for windows imho) and try to see what you can do with some linux commands, you can find a lot of stuff on bandwidth throttling with tc, or I could share some script, but we should adapt it to your router.

 

sry for the long post, hopefully I gave you some ideas

[Corey]

Thanks for the post sunlight. The ssh part and linux commands is a little bit out of my league for what I know how to do

 

I managed to find the QoS, but idk what to do with it?

 

 

 

 

Edit: I think i did it right, but could someone verify?

 

 

 

I got the UDP ports from their website.

[Cisco]

 

Via usual dynamic NAT when all the outgoing traffic is allowed, please, add a permission for input for WOT.exe:

 

ip access-list extended Inet_in

…

permit udp any eq 20013 20018 32801 32802 32803 32804 any

 

Notice: WOTLAUNCHER.exe is similar to an ordinary browser, so, you may use standard settings for it. As the game client works using transport protocols, the reverse traffic can’t be permitted by means of the following command: permit tcp any established.

The game client is getting connected with the server via UDP 20013, 20014, 20018, 32801-32825. It’s not recommended to give full permission for the whole incoming UDP. There are several servers, and the addresses may be changed and added (95.169.190.165, 95.169.190.170, 95.169.190.172), the client works with the outgoing flows from various ports, and the dynamic address may change as well, thus one may identify the incoming traffic only using the numbers of the ports it’s coming from.

 

 

 

I did some testing... I set the QoS thing up... made a 5 ghz and a 2 ghz channel. I was on the 5 ghz channel streaming netflix on my phone and my niece was on the 2.4 ghz channel streaming something from netflix and my ping went up for a split second, but it was not as bad as last night.... so maybe it helped? lol

Edited November 10, 2012 by Corey

[SunLight]

QoS, if properly setup, will give priority to your game, just make sure you get the port numbers and the protocol right (but they should be correct if you said you found them on a website).

I think it only affects uploading, at least from what I see in that window, but anyway it's hard to slow down incoming traffic.

 

You could even set a priority for the mac address of the pc from where you play, and you won't have to bother about ports, that pc will get a higher priority no matter what it does