Bandwidth
From Wikanual
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Bandwidth
Data throughput is often called bandwidth. It is much simpler than it appears: The amount of data transferred over a specific period of time is the bandwidth.
Megabit per second
Bandwidth is often being measured in Megabit per second (Mbps or Mb/s). Some programs display the bandwidth as MegaBYTES per second (MB/s). 1 MegaBYTE/s is identical to 8 Megabit/s.
Client experience
A clip that plays has a bandwidth need based on its size and lenght. Every internet connection has a bandwidth limit. In general one can say:
If the bandwidth needed by a clip is less than what the Internet connection can offer then the client will have a good experience.
Clip bandwidth
The clip bandwidth gets set during encoding. See the encoding page for details and recommendations.
In general you should aim to encode clips so that your clients can play them instantly. As of 2011 it can be assumed that most people are connected with around 2Mb/s to the Internet.
Clip bandwidth warnings
INTERDUBS will warn you if the bandwidth of a clip is higher or lower of configurable numbers. INTERDUBS itself has no problem with bandwidth requirements that are too small or too large.
The experience of your clients might get impacted by clips with very high or low bandwidth requirements. Our encoding pages are usually a great start point to improve clip creation.
You can set the high and low marks via a configuration to your specific needs. We recommend to update your encoding practises.
A red blinking bandwidth listing indicates bandwidth that might be to
high for most clients.
A black blinking bandwidth listing indicates bandwidth that might be to low for good quality
Auto emailing root admins when clips have the wrong bandwidth
If you enable the INTERDUBS configuration
email root admins if uploads have BW outside limits
then the system will send out an email whenever clips get uploaded that fall outside of the bandwidth limits. This email will contain the email address of the uploading admin as well as the name of the file(s) and the link in the admin interface.
Clip bandwidth in relationship to INTERDUBS end users
At http://www.interdubs.com/index.php?mensel=bw_capa you can see how many of the INTERDUBS end users will be able to playback a clip right away.
Connection bandwidth
The bandwidth of the actual connection is based on the lowest number of three parts of the connection:
Server
Luckily INTERDUBS always has enough bandwidth. This gets constant monitored since it is the raw material that INTERDUBS sells to its clients.
Connection
The data travels over the internet between the server and the client. These connections can take various routes. INTERDUBS is using 3 different connections to the Internet and will choose the fastest path available.
Client
The client is connected to the internet via wireless or ethernet but then also has just one connection to the actual Internet. Having not enough bandwidth in this part is the most frequent source of unsatisfactory performance.
INTERDUBS Server Background
INTERDUBS runs out of a very well connected data center. The theoretical limit for a single connection is 1000 Megabit right now. If the other side can support it, then connections of between 50 and 100 Megabit are possible. If you should need higher connection speeds then please get in touch with INTERDUBS.
But even 5 Megabit a second already allows a very high quality clip to be loaded faster than it plays.
On average clips stored in INTERDUBS play at around 2 to 4 Megabits. This allows for a very good image at resolutions of 700 pixels in X or more. (Especially when used in conjunction with a modern codec like h264 or x264).
INTERDUBS will always have enough up and downstream bandwidth. If you feel that it could be faster in a specific case then please let us know. If you like, you can run the OS X terminal program
traceroute www.interdubs.com
on the computer that has the speed issue, and send the output along with your observations. You can also run a traceroute command in the OS X network utility.
Or go to the respective speedtest page of the data center that you use.
LA / west coast: www speedtest New York: ny speedtest Europe: e1 speedtest
To see how fast you uploaded into INTERDUBS you can go to
upload performance
in the uploads section of
utilities
Transcode
If you like then you can recompress clips that you have uploaded to INTERDUBS with our servers. Please see Transcode for details.