Netflix Session Hosting?

[novagas240]

I want 50 users to remote into a server to watch Netflix and YouTube.

The users will have a 1.5MB DSL connection, while the server has a 1GB or more connection.

I was thinking about doing this with hyper-V session hosting but I don't know if that is the most cost efficient or not.

I don't know if adding GPU's to the server would help, I chose session hosting over remote desktop because I can assign parts of a GPU to each user.

I don't know what kind of hardware I need in this server, or how it will work, any help is appreciated???

[intertan]

ever thought of a plex/emby setup?

[FloRolf]

Do you essentially just want to share your Netflix screen with a bunch of people? Why not use TeamViewer or something? 

 

Also, isn't that illegal? 

[Jarsky]

50 is a lot of people....no doubt that violates the personal use agreement that Netflix has with studios and content providers. Remotely providing service to 50 people is commercial use. 

[Mikensan]

You're limited very quickly by the users' download rate, and your upload rate. A 1080p stream ballparks 20mbit/s, so right off the bat the DSL users won't be able to keep up since netflix will try to push 1080p to your server given its connection/ability. I mean you could lower the quality of what your server sends back out, but it's not going to be pretty.  

  

I've used teamviewer meeting for me and one other to watch a movie together - sometimes the audio loses sync. I've also used OBS but the delay local vs remote is going to be pretty large. I setup OBS on my desktop, watched on my laptop and then over skype watched it remotely. My laptop and the remote client were out of sync by quite a bit.

 

Ultimately I settled with teamviewer meeting, just easier to click and go. Audio issue is somewhat easy to fix just a PITA when you're really into something.

 

Oddly enough I've seen people on Kodi literaly point a webcam and stream with that.....

[Salv8 (sam)]

On 12/3/2018 at 11:25 AM, FloRolf said:

Also, isn't that illegal? 

no, Netflix will ban your IP but no it's not illegal to do something like this, Netflix doesn't say anything about watching their content in a virtual machine

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

no, Netflix will ban your IP but no it's not illegal to do something like this, Netflix doesn't say anything about watching their content in a virtual machine

That's the difference about breaking ToS and a law, something being illegal is quite a bit different.

[FloRolf]

5 hours ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

no, Netflix will ban your IP but no it's not illegal to do something like this, Netflix doesn't say anything about watching their content in a virtual machine

I was not referring to running it in an VM but rather streaming to over 50 people, lol. 

[Mikensan]

By restreaming "their" content you're distrbuting without a license and the owners of the movie(s) could file a lawsuit. Whatever law the RIAA uses when they file a lawsuit against torrent seeders would apply. You may have a legal right to a copy, but not distribution rights.

[novagas240]

Thank you all for your replies, I do not want to stream anything.

I want to provide a remotes desktop session to at least 50 different users.

Those users all want to use Microsoft office, YouTube, and Netflix, mainly Netflix.

The users would just go to chrome on their individual remote desktop sessions and sign in to their own personal Netflix account.

Will I need a GPU because, current RDP sucks with videos.

the clients will remote into the server that has a 10GB dedicated fiber from comcast.

will this work?

[AngryBeaver]

19 minutes ago, novagas240 said:

Thank you all for your replies, I do not want to stream anything.

I want to provide a remotes desktop session to at least 50 different users.

Those users all want to use Microsoft office, YouTube, and Netflix, mainly Netflix.

The users would just go to chrome on their individual remote desktop sessions and sign in to their own personal Netflix account.

Will I need a GPU because, current RDP sucks with videos.

the clients will remote into the server that has a 10GB dedicated fiber from comcast.

will this work?

If this is all they are doing then there is literally no benefit from just accessing it straight from their machine and taking the VM out of the picture all together. This is just introducing a new variable that adds nothing.

 

On top of that you are going to need a good deal of memory and also for best practice at least one core per VM. So figure 4gb of ram and a core for each session and that means you need 50 cores and 200gb of ram.

[Mikensan]

16 hours ago, AngryBeaver said:

If this is all they are doing then there is literally no benefit from just accessing it straight from their machine and taking the VM out of the picture all together. This is just introducing a new variable that adds nothing.

 

On top of that you are going to need a good deal of memory and also for best practice at least one core per VM. So figure 4gb of ram and a core for each session and that means you need 50 cores and 200gb of ram.

My assumption is people will be treating it like a VPN to gain access to services not available in their country (idk about the office suite though lol)?

 

Anywho I agree with AngryBeaver, RDP for those resources is odd. They're still limited by their own internet speeds, and for region locked content a VPN would be better. Chrome and netflix will eat up a lot of RAM, so 4gb per use is very fair. Dual socket 12c/24ht processors would definitely be recommended, even if netflix steams in 264 it still takes CPU time per stream. 

 

RDP is good for work environments where people need access to resources not available over the internet - netflix/youtube/office are all available outside your network.

[AngryBeaver]

58 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

My assumption is people will be treating it like a VPN to gain access to services not available in their country (idk about the office suite though lol)?

 

Anywho I agree with AngryBeaver, RDP for those resources is odd. They're still limited by their own internet speeds, and for region locked content a VPN would be better. Chrome and netflix will eat up a lot of RAM, so 4gb per use is very fair. Dual socket 12c/24ht processors would definitely be recommended, even if netflix steams in 264 it still takes CPU time per stream. 

 

RDP is good for work environments where people need access to resources not available over the internet - netflix/youtube/office are all available outside your network.

If the OP is still dead set on this... He should look into VDI and RDS to simplify this task. In the end though if it IS a region thing he would be better off just configuring this thing to be a proxy.

[novagas240]

OK, so it was my understanding that RDP uses like 64kb of bandwidth, and it doesn't matter what you are doing.

Like if you were on a remote desktop session and downloaded a massive file and it downloaded very fast because the server had 10gb fiber but you are at home with 1 Mbps.

I thought that they could remote in and use the servers super fast internet to watch Netflix and you tube, am I wrong? PS: This is not region specific, just in the US.

[Mikensan]

21 minutes ago, novagas240 said:

OK, so it was my understanding that RDP uses like 64kb of bandwidth, and it doesn't matter what you are doing.

Like if you were on a remote desktop session and downloaded a massive file and it downloaded very fast because the server had 10gb fiber but you are at home with 1 Mbps.

I thought that they could remote in and use the servers super fast internet to watch Netflix and you tube, am I wrong? PS: This is not region specific, just in the US.

You are asking about videos, which still has to be transmitted back to the end user. This isn't a glass window, it's a repeater. Now RDP might compress it and then the user gets shitty quality - but netflix and youtube already do that.

 

However if they want to download a large ISO and play with some software on your RDP Server - that's fine. There's nothing to draw on the screen.

[WereCatf]

58 minutes ago, novagas240 said:

I thought that they could remote in and use the servers super fast internet to watch Netflix and you tube, am I wrong?

So, your thinking was that there's some magic sauce in RDP that manages to recompress video into 64Kbps bitrates without losing quality? Don't you think if that was possible, Youtube, Netflix etc. would already be using such magic sauce from the get-go themselves?

[AngryBeaver]

1 hour ago, novagas240 said:

OK, so it was my understanding that RDP uses like 64kb of bandwidth, and it doesn't matter what you are doing.

Like if you were on a remote desktop session and downloaded a massive file and it downloaded very fast because the server had 10gb fiber but you are at home with 1 Mbps.

I thought that they could remote in and use the servers super fast internet to watch Netflix and you tube, am I wrong? PS: This is not region specific, just in the US.

On top of this you are assuming you can even watch the video via built in RDP. Which in most cases is problematic and doesn't work for shit. Now if using other software for the RDP function then it is possible, but the data still has to be transmitted and this isn't going to save them much if any bandwidth.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, novagas240 said:

OK, so it was my understanding that RDP uses like 64kb of bandwidth, and it doesn't matter what you are doing.

Like if you were on a remote desktop session and downloaded a massive file and it downloaded very fast because the server had 10gb fiber but you are at home with 1 Mbps.

I thought that they could remote in and use the servers super fast internet to watch Netflix and you tube, am I wrong? PS: This is not region specific, just in the US.

Netflix is likely going to look like garbage, since IF RDP managed to compress it down to 64 Kbps, then that's your effective video bitrate.

 

Keep in mind that 480p YouTube, which is already somewhat garbage, uses 2.5 Mbps (2560 Kbps) (edit: apparently it uses a range of 500 Kbps to 2000 Kbps) of bitrate. 64 Kbps would be barely enough for audio to come through. It would be a literal slideshow with actual video.

 

More than likely, it'll either just not work/be a slideshow, or it'll use as much bandwidth as if they just watched Netflix directly.

 

Frankly, there seems to be no good reason to do the solution you're looking at doing.

[novagas240]

I have at least 50 (for now but up to 800 users within 5 years) users with a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection who want to watch Netflix and Youtube.

I thought this whole RDP thing would work, but from the sounds of it, it won't. How can I create a solution for these people, would Citrix or Silverlight help me?

[dalekphalm]

45 minutes ago, novagas240 said:

I have at least 50 (for now but up to 800 users within 5 years) users with a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection who want to watch Netflix and Youtube.

I thought this whole RDP thing would work, but from the sounds of it, it won't. How can I create a solution for these people, would Citrix or Silverlight help me?

No. Nothing is going to help, aside from each of them getting a better connection.

 

1.5 Mbps DSL should be sufficient for low quality YouTube (360p, probably 480p too). Netflix on the other hand is going to be tricky. Even 480p streams at around 1750 Kbps - so it'll work, kind of, but there'll be buffering frequently.

 

Using Citrix or some other solution (How would Silverlight help you?) will not work, because the user is still streaming video, and the user still has a 1.5 Mbps connection.

 

Even if you can get a remote desktop or remote session to work with Netflix/YouTube, it's going to look extremely bad, assuming it's even fluid at all.

[WereCatf]

1 hour ago, novagas240 said:

I have at least 50 (for now but up to 800 users within 5 years) users with a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection who want to watch Netflix and Youtube.

I thought this whole RDP thing would work, but from the sounds of it, it won't. How can I create a solution for these people, would Citrix or Silverlight help me?

 

Technically, Netflix uses H.264-codec for their streams, so one could transcode those streams into H.265 and save some space in that way, but H.265 is a horribly slow codec to encode with. Also, getting a stream down so much that it can be sufficiently enjoyed on a 1.5Mbps connection would practically mean having to drop all the way down to 360p or so. Doing H.265 at, say, 29.976FPS and 360p, you'd need about 3 cores per user just for transcoding the video; with 50 users, you'd need ~150 cores in order to be able to serve them all simultaneously!

 

Then there's the software-aspect: you'd need to write custom software of your own that grabs the Netflix/Youtube/whatnot-stream, transcodes it and then streams the transcoded video to the end-users.

[dalekphalm]

4 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

 

Technically, Netflix uses H.264-codec for their streams, so one could transcode those streams into H.265 and save some space in that way, but H.265 is a horribly slow codec to encode with. Also, getting a stream down so much that it can be sufficiently enjoyed on a 1.5Mbps connection would practically mean having to drop all the way down to 360p or so. Doing H.265 at, say, 29.976FPS and 360p, you'd need about 3 cores per user just for transcoding the video; with 50 users, you'd need ~150 cores in order to be able to serve them all simultaneously!

 

Then there's the software-aspect: you'd need to write custom software of your own that grabs the Netflix/Youtube/whatnot-stream, transcodes it and then streams the transcoded video to the end-users.

Keep in mind that he said the user count could go up to 800.

 

There's just no practical way to do this.

[WereCatf]

Just now, dalekphalm said:

Keep in mind that he said the user count could go up to 800.

 

There's just no practical way to do this.

I'd like to know the thinking behind the 800 users, to be honest; was the OP just counting the number of people with poor Internet-connections and assumed that they'd all be joining his service or what?

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

I'd like to know the thinking behind the 800 users, to be honest; was the OP just counting the number of people with poor Internet-connections and assumed that they'd all be joining his service or what?

I have no idea - perhaps he's reselling low end DSL connections. Perhaps that's the best that is available in the area.

[Velcade]

Nevermind... this is insane.