Gamepass Cloud Streaming Unplayable: Poor video quality over 1Gbps internet service.

el-toddo · Jun 29, 2022

I'm starting to use the streaming capabilities of Xbox Cloud that's part of my Gamepass Ultimate subscription. I'm experiencing an issue that I'm having a hard time finding anyone else having, let alone any way to troubleshoot it using official tools (haven't found any MS provided tools or debug stats). My home internet performance seems pretty good, but I've definitely isolated the issue to SOMETHING with my home internet performance, as the problem goes away if I use my phone's internet via tethering. I suspect a jitter issue the Xbox app's video codec can't correct.

The problem: Video Corruption - all streaming games totally unplayable:

When I use the Xbox app on two different computers and an Android cell phone, on all 3 I have corrupted video to the point that everything is unplayable right from the start of the streaming session. I'm currently using Fallout 76 as my test game and can't even get the mostly static main menu to display properly right at the start of the game. The initial Bethesda logo animation starts and immediately there's video corruption, seemingly from the first frame of video. When I progress to the game's main menu, the video stream never recovers. The menu options I select are totally unintelligible, and if I bring up the game's scoreboard from that menu, which has a completely static image, the video stream still never recovers. The top maybe 1/3rd of the screen has some visibility but everything below is so corrupted that I can't even navigate the scoreboard. Other games I try to stream exhibit identical, or nearly so, video corruption.

My internet service and internet performance:

I'm with Distributel, a small carrier in the Ottawa, ON area which uses the Roger's Cable infrastructure to provide service. I'm subscribed to their 1 Gbps down, 30 Mbps up internet plan. All my video streaming services (Netflix, Youtube, Disney+, Crave, etc.) all stream with excellent quality; no surprise though since they can buffer around most latency/jitter issues. All latency sensitive applications like VoIP phones, Zoom, Teams, Skype, Duo, and other online games all perform quite well on my internet connection. Ping times in most online games report well under 100ms normally.

Using ping and tracerout commands, I can get mostly consistent pings to places like google and other public servers well under 50ms, but I tend to bottom out at around 25-30ms. When I traceroute, I can ping to the first hop (the first router between my house an my ISP) pretty consistently averaging around 20-23ms using a continuous ping at a rate of 10 pings a second. I'm not too happy with that, but the numbers don't really jump much higher at each router going to 8.8.8.8, Google's primary public DNS, where the same continuous ping average about 30ms at a rate of 10 pings per second.

Given the high throughput of my connection, I've been focusing on isolating latency, jitter and packet loss issues, which you'll see in the results below aren't a serious concern, I don't think. I've been using https://packetlosstest.com (wonderful tool by the way!) which uses WebRTC components in the browser to simulate various payloads over DTLS encoded media streams. I choose the closest geographical server: New Jersey and select the "1080p Game Stream" test, and change the acceptable latency to 100ms. That's my baseline test for visualizing performance of what's likely happening with gamepass' media streams. As for results, below is typical. I get a mostly clean trace when I run the test as seen here:

Wired vs Wireless LAN connection:

With my PC and my laptop, I get identical video corruption issues regardless of if I connect over WiFi or have hard-wired performance. All other analysis of bandwidth and latency stats don't change over either WiFi or Ethernet.

I tend to do most of my troubleshooting while wired just to eliminate the possibilty that my neighbor running their microwave doesn't cause me to chase a problem that actually someone's dinner. But I will frequently repeat tests using both to make sure there aren't significant differences in results.

Eliminating my WiFi and my home router as likely causes:

To see if I could isolate the problem to either my Wifi (Ubiquiti Unifi U6-Pro) or my home router (Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X), I disconnected my router from the Cable Modem (Technicolor TC4400 DOCSIS 3.1) and momentarily plugged in one of the PC's directly into the cable modem with an Ethernet cable and used the Xbox app to try loading Fallout 76. There may have been a very slight improvement, but the video corruption still made even the game's main menu totally unnavigable. Content that the issue isn't caused by my home WiFi or router, I went back to other avenues of analysis and troubleshooting.

Hints at the root cause of the issue:

The biggest hint to my ISP being the root cause of an issue here is that if I tether either computer to my Android phone and bypass my LAN/ISP entirely and instead use my 4G LTE internet on my phone, I can get a video stream that's not corrupted. It's not ideal either, but I think there's a major hint here as to what's going on. So running the Xbox app on either PC or my Android phone, I get a video stream that isn't corrupted!

To my surprise, one test I ran using my ISP's internet actually resulted in a usable video stream. If I load the Xbox Cloud streaming service in my browser, I can get a stable video stream. I assume that this is because the video stream to the browser is being streamed using a DTLS encapsulated standard video codec, and the Xbox app's use something else that's more sensitive to my ISP's characteristics.

Need Help:

What I need from someone else, preferably from an official Microsoft representative, is any suggestions on how I can troubleshoot this further. Either with tests I haven't tried yet, settings or debug options that are hidden by default, maybe some kind of statistics that the Xbox app might be able to show. Anyway, I'm at a loss, I've spent probably around 10 hours of my life trying to troubleshoot this, and I'd like to get my Xbox app streaming games that I can play. I don't think that's a tough ask.

I'm happy to go into further details of things I've tried, or provide any info that might be relevant. For now I'll post this and see what comes of it.

Thanks for reading to the end! Any help is much appreciated!

:)

el-toddo

Hi Rob,

This does sound like the issue I was experiencing, but yours sounds more intermittent, where mine was constant from the moment I started receiving a video stream. You also don't mention if it was a one-off issue, happens once a minute, once a play session, a few times a play session. Some more detail would be good.

Firstly, don't replace your TV for this reason. I severely doubt it'll help.

You provided no detail on whether this is a PC hooked up to your TV or you are using an Xbox or some other device to launch the stream. That might be good detail. If you have another monitor or TV you can test with, that might help definitively tell you if a new TV might help.

More likely, you need to find a way to determine the jitter and latency of your internet connection. If your latencies generally test well, but will spike on occasion, that could cause what you're seeing. If your latencies are fairly stable but jitter is up and down periodically, that could also be a similar cause to what I was experiencing. Then finally you'll want to test for packet loss, as that could also exhibit the same behavior. There are a bunch of tests around the internet for these stats, so search around. They won't give an exact picture of what your connection to Microsoft's servers is, but can help you know what ballpark you're in.

Jan Andre Røe Norwa

I have 500/500 mbps line. (norway)

Ping 1ms

Same problem.

I will not use cloud gaming on pc anymore (unusable)

Same problem as other.

Pixelated ( like bad divx in the old days)

And also this "curtain" that goes down VERY OFTEN.

Works better on Xbox one x than my computer.

Lets just say the pc is not the problem

[RobertLewis]

Hi, I'm having a very similar issue when playing games via streaming.

I get a sort of wave of pixels flowing down the screen like a curtain at either parts of the game where there is a lot going on onscreen or after a cutscene.

But the image then returns to normal until it does it again which can be frequent.

But tonight the game I was playing was literally unplayable as the top third of the screen was visible and anything lower down was blocky and pixelated. I've tried resetting the WiFi router and doing all the usual Microsoft fixes but nothing has helped so I have given up for the night.

It dropped connection a few times too.

My internet connection seems to be good and I'm getting good speeds so do you think this would be a server issue at the Microsoft end?

I was debating whether or not to get a new TV as the current one is about 5 yrs old and doesn't support HDR or HDMI 2.1 or 120fps but I gather this wouldn't help if the issue starts at the server end of things?

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Rob

[RobertLewis]

UPDATE

Download speed - 54.5mbps

Upload speed -17.8mbps

Ping -11ms

Jitter-0.0ms

Packet loss-0%

XBF John

Hey There,

Sorry I did reply but it's because Kathy had already asked. I escalated your issue to Xbox Teams and since you are participating in the Cloud Beta, we made an adjustment on our end to better track networking issues. I would ask that any time you face networking issues please submit feedback through Report a Problem or the feedback channels available to you. We are doing our best to improve and create a better Cloud gaming experience and we can't without feedback from users.

If you want better metrics reported, the Xbox Insiders does that for us, that when you send information or feedback or reports we get information and data in reference to our apps to see where the issues are and find ways to see if we can fix or improve it.

The issues you detail, and record can be essential in the development of Xbox Cloud gaming and the feedback you give goes straight to the teams where they can confront it directly. Of course, when you give feedback, it takes a while for it to be found, repaired and implemented so that's why we asked many to join insiders especially if they're trying developing software like Cloud gaming.

Gamepass Cloud Streaming Unplayable: Poor video quality over 1Gbps internet service.