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Chozo
Founder
Founder

Constant stream freezes and controller disconnects

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Hi guys,

Founder here. Been using Stadia on my CCU since Stadia's launch day, with pretty much no issue until fairly recently. Over the last couple months or so, it's becoming increasingly difficult to play a game on my CCU for more than a few minutes before the stream completely freezes on me without recovering. It's incredibly intermittent; sometimes it'll happen once after several hours of playing, sometimes it'll happen dozens of times in under an hour. When this happens, after a few moments my controller will disconnect and power itself off. Sometimes it's the opposite, where my controller will disconnect first, and then the video stream.

The only solution when this happens so far has been to power the controller off and back on, exit the game session, and relaunch the game, and then it's about a 50/50 chance of getting back into my existing session where I left off, or being kicked back to the title screen of the game. This is, of course, incredibly frustrating when trying to do a raid with my Destiny 2 buddies, or trying to complete an Expert mission in Hitman where I can't save the game whenever I want to. It's gotten to the point where my clanmates in Destiny 2 are becoming hesitant to even do any activities with me, because they know that there's a very significant chance that my session will end abruptly and they'll be down a man, thus making me a liability to the rest of the team.

This happens on every game I play, and *only* seems to happen when playing on my CCU. I've been unable to replicate this issue on my phone or my laptop.

As for my network, I have a Google/Nest WIfi router, with no additional access points. I've enabled the "Gaming preferred" option on the router to prioritize Stadia traffic, and have also tried playing with the CCU or the controller set to "Priority device", and none of this has made any difference in performance. I've monitored my network traffic when this issue occurs, and no other devices on the network have had any abnormal amount of download/upload traffic at all. The CCU and router are about 10 feet apart from each other; they're in separate rooms, but aside from the ceiling/floor, there are no objects or other appliances between them. I can't find anything that's a potential cause of network interference. 

I've even been dealing with Stadia's support team for a few weeks now, and have not been able to make any progress whatsoever. I mean no disrespect to the Stadia support reps who have been nothing but kind and patient with me, but I feel as though whoever is manning the Stadia support chat do not have any idea how to troubleshoot anything, and that they're just reading off of a script. For instance, after over a week of back-and-forth emailing with a senior specialist, the "solution" they suggested is to replace my controller (despite the fact that I have two controllers and the issue is persistent on both, and both controllers have zero issues when playing Stadia from my phone or laptop), which obviously I'm hesitant to follow-through with because I'd rather not spend a bunch of time troubleshooting something that's clearly not related to the issue. I've even asked multiple support reps on a few occasions now if they can check my user logs, to see if there's anything that indicates the cause of these disconnects, and so far it seems that nobody has the capacity to check these logs. This is all meant to be a criticism of whoever is managing the support teams, and not the actual support reps, themselves.

A Stadia support rep had eventually given up on my issue, and told me to contact Nest Wifi support for further help. I did, and they did some very basic network troubleshooting with me, and were unable to find any cause of the problem, as they determined that my network is operating as expected. I'm currently waiting for what I believe is my third Stadia support ticket to be escalated back to a senior specialist once again. 

As for the troubleshooting I've done so far:

  • Powercycled modem, router, CCU, and controller
  • Verified the CCU can stream other video content without issue, including low-latency Twitch/YouTube streams
  • Reset my CCU and controller to factory defaults
  • Enabled/disabled "Gaming preferred" on my Nest Wifi router
  • Ran speed tests from multiple devices in various locations of my home (including the locations where my controller and CCU are), reliably getting 200+ mbps with 0% packet loss every time
  • Lowered my stream resolution
  • Set my DNS settings to Google DNS (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4)
  • Forwarded TCP/UDP ports 44700-44899 to my Stadia controller

I'm frustrated and out of ideas at this point. If anybody else has had a similar problem and found a solution, I would love to know it.

3 Kudos
Best Response
RXShorty
Platinum Stadia Guide
Platinum Stadia Guide

Hi @Chozo,

That is really annoying! Looks like you tried a lot before posting here.
Did you try joining the Chromecast Ultra Preview program to see if a new firmware update could resolve this? (ofcourse it is preview...).
This can be done from the Google Home app within the Chromecast Ultra settings.

If that doesn't work out you should check how hot your CCU is.
The CCU can overheat and that can cause issues... 

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2 Kudos
Borussia
Silver Stadia Guide
Silver Stadia Guide

Only for your side problem: CCUs can get very hot. This is because Google uses the plastic plate to dissipate the heat energy. They are directly connected with a therrmal pad.

If you want to help your CCU, you can attach some heatsinks. The cheap ones for a Raspberry Pi will do. You don't need to open your CCU, just use some thermal tape and glue them to the outside of the plastic shell. Helped my CCUs a lot with the heat issue. Does not look very eye pleasing though, but who cares as it is on the back of your TV :slightly_smiling_face:

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1 Kudo
cristianss156
Silver Stadia Guide
Silver Stadia Guide

Without forgetting the overheating problem. I had similar problems recently. The cause was that when configuring the controller, I connected it to the 5g network of my router. Changing the network to 2.4GHz, only on the controller, fixed it

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0 Kudos
11 Replies
RXShorty
Platinum Stadia Guide
Platinum Stadia Guide

Hi @Chozo,

That is really annoying! Looks like you tried a lot before posting here.
Did you try joining the Chromecast Ultra Preview program to see if a new firmware update could resolve this? (ofcourse it is preview...).
This can be done from the Google Home app within the Chromecast Ultra settings.

If that doesn't work out you should check how hot your CCU is.
The CCU can overheat and that can cause issues... 

2 Kudos
Chozo
Founder
Founder

My CCU definitely gets very hot while playing Stadia. I don't have anything to read the temperature with, but it gets hot enough that I wouldn't want to hold it bare-handed for more than a few seconds. 

That's a good suggestion about the preview program, though. I just enabled that and will test it out later today to see if there's any change in behavior.

 

EDIT: To update, I've enabled the Preview Program on my CCU. It doesn't appear that there's a newer version of the firmware available yet, so it doesn't look like it's made any change.

1 Kudo
Borussia
Silver Stadia Guide
Silver Stadia Guide

Only for your side problem: CCUs can get very hot. This is because Google uses the plastic plate to dissipate the heat energy. They are directly connected with a therrmal pad.

If you want to help your CCU, you can attach some heatsinks. The cheap ones for a Raspberry Pi will do. You don't need to open your CCU, just use some thermal tape and glue them to the outside of the plastic shell. Helped my CCUs a lot with the heat issue. Does not look very eye pleasing though, but who cares as it is on the back of your TV :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Kudo
Mr_N0
Stadia Player
Stadia Player

It is just ridiculous that we need to glue heatsinks on the CCU!

Very bad design!

Google just hurting itselfe, as I have to suspend my Stadia subscription now!

The devil is in the details, but I can't believe that such a huge company does such a bad job..

0 Kudos
cristianss156
Silver Stadia Guide
Silver Stadia Guide

Without forgetting the overheating problem. I had similar problems recently. The cause was that when configuring the controller, I connected it to the 5g network of my router. Changing the network to 2.4GHz, only on the controller, fixed it

0 Kudos
Chozo
Founder
Founder

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to specify whether a device connects to 2.4 or 5 GHz networks on the Nest Wifi router. It seems like it auto-configs all devices, with no options to change this (unless I'm missing them somewhere).

0 Kudos
Chozo
Founder
Founder

Update 4/7/2021:

Stadia support seems to no longer be responding to my tickets, so I gave up and paid my ISP to come out and relocate my modem/router to be close enough to my CCU that I can just run an ethernet connection directly to the CCU instead of using wifi. 

This seems to have resolved the issues with the stream shutting off and disconnecting my controller. However now I'm getting really bad video/audio stutter. The video and audio will briefly blip out every ~3 seconds. If I plug in a headset to my controller, it'll cut out for entire seconds of audio. 

Unfortunately, it seems as though I've only managed to replace one problem with another problem. I may have to reach back out to Stadia support to troubleshoot this new issue separately, however this has been an absolutely abysmal experience so far, especially considering that I know that the tech behind Stadia works and that I've been a huge advocate for the platform since it launched, but I can't seem to get a stable game session anymore. I feel truly let down by Google's inadequate handling of this issue.

I'm also rather upset that @ChrisFromGoogle has marked this thread as "Solved" when the issue is still ongoing.

2 Kudos
ViviFFIX
Platinum Stadia Guide
Platinum Stadia Guide

Hi Again,

I can see a lot of troubleshooting steps have been tried so far, so I am not going to go over those again, I'll assume you've tried all those.

You're having issues with the CCU using Stadia on your home internet, can I ask if you have any other devices on the same network (phone or computer) that you've tried Stadia with? Also, could you do a speed test via CloudFlare and post the results here including latency and jitter? Finally could you also please advise whether this is impacting multiple games or just one?

Thanks!

- Vivi
Oooh! I have a signature now! Huzzah!
0 Kudos
Chozo
Founder
Founder

Hi Vivi,

Thanks for the response. I've just tested Stadia from my phone, and the current issues with the audio/video stuttering don't appear to be present there. It actually runs more smoothly from my phone on wifi than it does on my CCU with ethernet.

As for the speed test results, I've got:

  • Download: 198 Mbps
  • Upload: 2.62 Mbps (Not sure why this is so low; I typically get ~10 Mbps up)
  • Latency: 22.7 ms
  • Jitter: 8.78 ms

As for testing in multiple games, I've tested in Destiny 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Celeste, and seem to be getting fairly consistent audio/video stuttering when playing on my CCU. It doesn't appear to be present in any of these when playing from my phone, however. 

0 Kudos
ViviFFIX
Platinum Stadia Guide
Platinum Stadia Guide

Hello again!

So... Doesn't appear to be connection related based on the connection quality and it's not impacting playing on your phone.

Does your TV have a game mode? If so, try enabling this.

Also, if you have another TV in the house, have you tried it on that? 

@ShadowKnight has pointed out that it might be related to the TV and could explain why you get no audio stutter on the controller but do on the TV.

- Vivi
Oooh! I have a signature now! Huzzah!
1 Kudo
ChrisFromGoogle
Community Specialist
Community Specialist

Hi @Chozo, I apologize that it appeared like we had solved your problem when we had not. As a point of clarity, I often mark responses as "Best Responses" in order to indicate that helpful information has been provided, in case others are searching for similar information. 

 

With regard to your particular issue, it seems we have narrowed down the problem from a connection issue to a potential hardware issue with your Chromecast Ultra. It is possible that it is experiencing a heat dissipation issue. There are some unofficial/unsupported options for how to resolve this issue oneself, but I suggest reaching back out to our support team and posing your issue this way. Hopefully, they will be able to help you further.

1 Kudo