Setting up qos for htpc?

QOS doesn't work over the Internet, and if you already have a gigabit LAN internally there isn't a reason to use QOS. QOS is beneficial if you will be connecting two LANs over a VPN and need to reserve bandwidth for a specific application like VOIP.

Not sure what you mean by "QOS doesn't work over the Internet". QOS can certainly be used to prioritize internet access among various devices on your network.

QOS will only work on your LAN Zon2020 and that is a function of the router not a SoHo switch. You can't guarantee bandwidth unless you have a "smart" switch. Unless you are regularly saturating a gigabit switch QOS will do you no good. Don't worry about QOS On your LAN. A top of the line bluray will only be about 50Mb/s which will no where near saturate a 1000Mb/s connection.

Now if you want to guarantee bandwidth leaving your LAN you can setup QOS on your router, but all the switches and routers between you and the remote site have to support QOS too. Most consumer level ISPs will not pass this information unless you setup a VPN tunnel.

Simply put QOS is not not a consumer level concern.

Of course you can't control what happens beyond your own router, but you can certainly prioritze within your own router the access to the WAN, which I think is what he wants to do. DD-WRT and many routers allow you to implement QOS on your WAN connection as well as on your LAN. No one is suggesting he can control QOS between Netflix and his own gateway. And I agree that with gigabit ethernet there's no need for LAN QOS for a consumer, but with far more limited internet throughput, WAN QOS can be useful at times.

It sounds like that is what he wants to do, yes. But it's important to understand that the router does not direct traffic on the LAN... the clients and switch direct traffic on the same segment. The router is a bridge to another LAN/WAN. So unless he's got his media server on one LAN, and the HTPC on another LAN with a router inbetween, then QOS isn't needed or used.


Yes, you are correct, but it's important to understand that QOS is pointless unless your remote WAN connection supports it as well. QOS on the LAN is really only good for saturated networks that depend on guaranteed bandwidth to specific services, like say a SIP connection to your internal Asterisk server. QOS on your WAN interface is only good up to your WAN interface. Say you want to reserve 25Kb/s for your external VOIP service, you can do this at your router level, and any other traffic leaving your router to the internet will respect that. But there will be no guaranteed bandwidth once it leaves your router into the tubes.

Your typical home network is rarely saturated with internal traffic, and with a switch it's point-to-point. Say you are transferring a movie from your HTPC to your media server... you can saturate a gigabit connection point-to-point from the server to HTPC, but at the same time you could stream a netflix movie on a second HTPC and not be affected at all by the data move, because the data is coming from a different source (WAN traffic).


So... here's a question to the OP: Why do you think you need QOS on your local LAN?

It doesn't work that way. Netfilx will stream as fast as your ISP will allow up to about 4Mb/s. It will auto-regulate if that maximum bandwidth isn't available and slowdown/speedup the bitrate accordingly. Setting up QOS on your router will not guarantee that Netflix will always deliver a 4Mb/s stream. QOS doesn't work over the internet.

All you would be doing by enabling QOS to your HTPC, is guaranteeing 4Mb/s outgoing bandwidth to the internet.


Stuttering is not usually caused by a bandwidth issue with netflix... it's usually more of an issue with your GPU or silverlight not supporting hardware GPU assist.

No one is talking about changing what Netflix streams.

But he can certainly use QOS so that if he wants to watch a video from Netflix, and his son is downloading a video at the same time, that his netflix connection gets priority over his limited bandwidth from his ISP. Yes, we're talking about giving his Netflix stream priority to that 4MBs of bandwidth from his ISP.

We're not talking about chaning the internet outside his own router, we're talking about prioritzing the limited pipeline between his router and his ISP.

The router cannot perform QOS on incoming data. Outgoing, yes. You have no control over the packets arriving at your router, and what order/priority they are in. So... like I said, setting up QOS to regulate Netflix bandwidth is not going to work because both router nodes (yours and Netfix... and every node inbetween) have to support and pass QOS. Your ISP's edge router will apply QOS and traffic-shaping to it's internal network (including your router) to regulate internal traffic. But, your ISP will ignore your QOS requests because they are not going to dedicate bandwidth to your whims. If everyone setup QOS for outgoing packets and the ISP honored those requests then there would no longer be any bandwidth for anyone else.

Netflix traffic is 99% incoming, so QOS on your router will have no effect on it. Your router has no control over the order/priority of the packets it receives from the WAN. TCP/IP is basically a "best-effort" technology


Your WAN bandwidth is almost always less than your LAN bandwidth, and the bottleneck is at your router, not on LAN traffic. Since you cannot control QOS outside your network, setting up QOS for incoming traffic like Netflix streams will never work. And in that same breath, using QOS internally on your LAN is usually not going to do you any good unless you have specific bandwidth you want to dedicate to specific services on your LAN. And in that case, the router is not involved at all! The talking-clients on the LAN need to respect QOS, and this is not adjustable to the average user on Windows. Application developers and Group Policy can dictate QOS between clients on a LAN.

Pay attention to points # 1, 2, and 3 in the below article. The last 2 points they are basically trying to sell you their traffic-shaping appliance, which is really only useful to business/enterprise admins :P
http://netequalizernews.com/2010/08/29/qos-over-the-internet-is-it-possible-five-must-know-facts/