Slow download speed on Command Prompt

[triple7]

I've got a 10Mb internet speed, meaning I'll normally average 1.2 MB/s speeds at downloads. Even though it's not the best out there, that isn't too bad either, except that I'll get such a speed everywhere BUT on cmd.exe. So when I download something with livestreamer, ffmpeg, whatever code it is that uses Command Prompt, I'll get speeds as low as 400 KB/s, for example. Right now I'm struggling on a download at 250 KB/s, and here's why it's odd: I watched that same stream at its best quality on their website, which means you can't watch something with that great quality if your download speed is that low. So why is it that I get one thing on websites and another thing on cmd.exe? Any idea on how to work this around?

I sure wish I could use IDM behind cmd.exe

[shawn1122]

IDM uses parallel downloads (it downloads multiple segments of the file at once) in order to maximize your download speed. Livestreamer does not do this by default and it may not be possible for some streams (depends if the server allows it).

To imitate this function in Livestreamer, provided you're watching an HDS or HLS stream, look into the options hls-segment-threads and hds-segment-threads. (http://docs.livestreamer.io/cli.html under "stream transport options") I haven't used them myself, but the documentation makes it sound like it would download similarly to IDM. I think IDM uses 4 or 8 parallel streams at once, so you could try setting it to 4 and see if that improves the speed.

[triple7]

Originally Posted by shawn1122

IDM uses parallel downloads (it downloads multiple segments of the file at once) in order to maximize your download speed. Livestreamer does not do this by default and it may not be possible for some streams (depends if the server allows it).

To imitate this function in Livestreamer, provided you're watching an HDS or HLS stream, look into the options hls-segment-threads and hds-segment-threads. (http://docs.livestreamer.io/cli.html under "stream transport options") I haven't used them myself, but the documentation makes it sound like it would download similarly to IDM. I think IDM uses 4 or 8 parallel streams at once, so you could try setting it to 4 and seeing if that improves the speed.

I'll try that later on to see what can be achieved. Thank you for the hint.