Stuttering

[cranky-uk]

Hi,

I have had my WDTV Live hub for around 2 months now, all was running well, but now ocasionally i get an issue where the film seems to lag / stutter.

I am playing off a synology ds211 nas, with a wired connection, it's like the network speed just drops, if i pause it for a few seconds to give it chance to buffer it works great.

Any Suggestions?

[RoofingGuy]

How to resolve it would presumably depend on what's causing it.

It sounds like the bitrate of the files simply exceeds what Samba is capable of.

If that's the case, all you can do is either use "Media Server" instead of "Network Shares", or use an attached USB device, or re-encode the file to a bitrate that Samba is capable of.

[cranky-uk]

Thanks,

Will give it a go over UPnP rather than samba.

It's weird as it will work for an hour or so, then suddenly slow down, i pause it for a few seconds to let it catch up and away it goes again.

I have watched a few films without a hiccup, im beginning to think possibly a codec issue, I will do some more digging around.

[RoofingGuy]

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cranky-uk wrote:

It's weird as it will work for an hour or so, then suddenly slow down, i pause it for a few seconds to let it catch up and away it goes again.

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I'm not really a NAS guy, so I'm not sure what might cause that... if it was a PC share, it almost sounds as if the PC gets busy with housekeeping and virus scans and other tasks after an hour, and stops being able to send fast enough.

It still could be a bitrate issue, especially if it's a VBR file... it's possible that the first hour has a low enough bitrate for Samba to keep up with, but at a certain point, the bitrate exceeds Samba's capabilitites.  If playing it through a Media Server works fine, then it would seem to point at Samba not being able to keep up, and not something the NAS is doing or not doing.

[RoofingGuy]

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RoofingGuy wrote:

It sounds like the bitrate of the files simply exceeds what Samba is capable of.

If that's the case, all you can do is either use "Media Server" instead of "Network Shares", or use an attached USB device, or re-encode the file to a bitrate that Samba is capable of.

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:forehead smack:  I'm still used to my Live... I suppose on a Hub you could also copy the file to the Hub's internal drive if avoiding Samba is necessary for playback of the file.

[parnott100]

May also be some event occuring on your network or the NAS. In that case a media server connection may not solve the problem.

To see if the problem is network or NAS related then try-

1) Open a cmd window (this is for Windows, but there are ways of doing this in Linux or OSX)

2) Enter the command-      ping -t <ip address af NAS>   (no < > characters, just the IP address)

3) Play a movie and when you see the stuttering look at the output of the ping command

4) If you see time values in the ping output  that are other than around 'time<1ms' then, then there is some network or NAS event occuring. You will need to track this down.

If that does not indicate a problem then repeat the above but ping the WDTV and see if the time value changes significantly during the stuttering event. This would point to a WDTV problem.

If this does not indicate a problem then use mediainfo to analyze a file that is causeing the problem. http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en

It may be as suggested that the bitrate is too high.

[cranky-uk]

Thanks for the tips guy's.

I have been playing around with some of the settings on the WDTV and realised I had set it up to be 1080p @ 60hz, so I have changed this to auto and to match frame rate.

I have just watched Alien 3 in 1080p.... again and it "seems" ok, so I dont know if it was choking the CPU on the WDTV by upscaling or whatever it is called a 24fps movie to 60hz 

I'll keep an eye on it and see how it goes.

Cranky