Streaming Problems. Part 3

By on April 11, 2010 in News, Video, Windows Home Server

I thought it was time to update everyone on my “problem”.  The short story?  I am confused.  The long story?  I am *really* confused!

Once I got to a point in my TS-659 Pro review where I could actually do more than just document things, I started to play around a bit more with streaming from different sources.  The results?  Read on.

First, I moved the powerline adapters around and changed Ethernet cables in an effort to improve the signal.  Without much success.

To give one an idea of transfer rates, which is a question that one asked in a previous post:

  • Thru my Gb switch: ~ 40MB/sec
  • Thru my powerline adapter:” ~3MB/sec

Next, I tried to play a movie stored on the TS-659 Pro vs. the same movie store directly to my media server and on my HP X510.  I started with my reference movie, The Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring, and found the following.

  • X510: the movie would play anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes before sound loss would occur.  Once started, the problem became progressively worse.
  • TS-659 Pro:  After watching ~ 30 minutes of the movie (a couple of times), I could get an occasional temporary loss of sound.
  • Media Player: played without problem.

Next, I tried a couple of other movies, 9 and The Dark Knight.  The results:

  • X510: 9 was constantly losing sound.  The Dark Knight did not have a single loss of sound one hour into the movie.   Please note while watching the Batman movie, a backup started for one of my computers.
  • TS-659 Pro: 9 was constantly losing sound.  The Dark Knight did not have a single loss of sound one hour into the movie.
  • Media Player: No problems on either movie.

I realize that all this is quite unscientific, but I thought the results were quite interesting.  Conclusions?  To tell you the honest truth, I am at a loss.

For words and ideas.  Kind of…

While streaming from the TS-659 Pro seemed better than from a Windows machine, it was far from being it “works 24-7”.  I wonder if the problem has something with the recording format?  Whether it is 720P, 1080i, or 1080p?  Perhaps whether it is Dolby or DTS?  Looking at the DVD boxes really does not provide me adequate information to form opinions, however.  Perhaps ripping to a .VOB format just plain sucks?

Who knows the answer?  Certainly not I.  However, the next time I rip a movie, I will document as much information on the rip as possible.  I will rip to various formats.  Perhaps translate my current rips?

Regardless, I just wanted you all to know that the quest goes on with no end in sight.  I guess in the interim, I will simply have to copy over a movie to my media player when I want to watch something.  Kinda kills the concept of central storage.  Kinda kill the concept of browse and play.

Oh, well…


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About Jim Clark

Hello. I’m from the heartland of the U.S. Lots of corn and beans, although Iowa is a lot more than just farmland. It also has a few computer enthusiasts (no, not me!). I’ve been around PCs since I got my 1st PC XT aloooong time ago. WGS is one of the first sites I found centered around WHS. And the best. Every once in awhile, I do get away from the KB and enjoy time with and my wife and our 4 kids. And I do have a day job.
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  • Master_Marcel

    Hi Jim Clark, I have a Tvix 6600 media player. The problem starts when i'm playing a iso Mpeg 2 1080P movie with dts sound. Maybe you can confirm this. Success with your investigation.

  • Ragnor

    Have you ruled out the Realtek network adapters as the problem?

    From a quick read of your 3 posts on the streaming problems, it looks like most situations where you experience stuttering involve windows + realtek network adapter.

    Grab an Intel chipset PCIe Gigabit adapter for the X510 and see if that solves the problem, streaming from that machine to your player.

    • Ga

      Hmm Realtek adapters … I have 2 home servers, both with on-board realtek adapters:

      1. The first one I had constant problems – the most easily repeatable was that when a backup started, it would freeze at 0% and i’d have to go to the console of the WHS to reboot

      2. On the second, it all ran fine until I turned on jumbo frames .. then I started getting timeout and all sorts of other issues

      … so .. if you have Realtek adapters anywhere in the chain, turn off jumbo frames and try again.

      The other thing (and this is key) are bit rates for source material. Blurays (as in rips off an actual legally purchased disc) have bit rates peaking at 40Mb/s for video, and 6 or 7Mb/s for audio – ie, touching 50Mb/s with overhead. Many media players just can’t handle that. I lot of people testing these boxes use generic terms like 720p and 1080p bluray when they actually mean mkv files downloaded off the internet. These files are typically recodes of blurays etc and have file sizes a third or quarter that of the original, with bitrates barely hitting 15Mb/s peak.

      There’s two causes of problems in the media player – older/cheaper chipsets not able to handle such high media bit rates, and processors that can cope with managing/demuxing a 15Mb stream, but not a 50Mb one. Once the bit rate gets too high, the CPU is bouncing off 100% and problems occur with managing the caching/buffering of the network stream. This is why media players will often perform okay for the same material off a USB drive, or a server on the same hub, but will hit issues when managing a stream that goes over a few hops of homeplug etc and has latency only several ms more. Finally, 16MB of RAM in these boxes sounds enough, but when only half is used as a cache and the incoming stream is running at 6MB/s (ie 48Mb/s), it doesn’t leave a lot of headroom.

      I use 2GB Acer Revo (atom+ION) boxes running XBMC as media players, and even they have occasional stuttering issues with the most demanding source material, and my experiences there may give more clues to the problems you’re having.

      I upgraded the wireless cards in the Acer boxes (including adding a third antenna) and connected them to my wireless (802.11n @ 5GHz). This is the only 5GHz network where I live, and will happily do big file copies at 14MB/s (ie real wireless throughput of 112Mb/s). However, I ran into enless problems playing video over the wireless – in spite of the throughput, it seems the media player requesting the source material in lots of small chunks just threw the combination of the wireless and WHS into lots of latency that is just not there for wired connections. I’m hoping one day XBMC will have a setting where you can tell it to grab a full gig of RAM as a cache, with a setting saying something like ‘fill cache in chunks of xxMB’ so that it make requests to the server at (say) 100MB a time. I think that will go a long way to enabling better wireless play.

      Phew /rant ends..

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/rbonini rbonini

    Jim, check the hard disks themselves and check the SATA controller drivers. Upgrade the BIOS if you have to.

    I currently have a eSata PCI adaptor that will display the same problems if a drive is connected to it – bad Windows Server 2003 SATA controller drivers. It works perfectly under Windows 7 tho, so I suspect that it will be sorted in the next WHS release.

  • Matt_br

    Jim,

    I have the same sound loss problem, this occurs as wel with divx as mkv. And it doesn't only occur when streaming from my WHS (with ps3 media player), it also occurs when playing a simple divx from my readynas. My media player is a PS3 so I think the power is enough. My network is gigabit ethernet. My whs box is a Xeon dualcore 3ghz with 4gb ram, so it has enough power to transcode media I think.
    I'm also confused. I never found a solution to the problem, I first thought it came from the PS3. But as I read your problem, it seems to be the same, and thus not PS3 related. When I play the same media with windows media player : no problem at all. :-P

  • Diesel

    Interesting. I recently started having streaming issues as well (EX495 running to a HP Pavilion Elite e9180t then an HP MediaSmart Extender over a GB ethernet connection). I tried rebooting the EX495 and router with no change. When I reboot the Pavillion, the problem goes away for a while. Not sure if it's related or not, but more times than not, when I go to reboot the Pavillion, it tells me it needs rebooting to install the same MS Project SP3 that continues to fail to install. I don't recall having streaming issues before the "automatic upgrade" to MS Project SP3 showed up.

  • Diesel

    Based on Ga's comments above, I went home last night and updated the Realtek drivers on my EX495 and turned off Jumbo Frames on the server and the Pavilion. Based on one night's viewing (four different shows over about two hours), it seems to be working now. In the past if I paused a show on the Extender, it would start stuttering when I initiated play. I paused several times last night and no stuttering resulted.

    • Ga

      @Diesel

      Marvellous – not just me then. I fixed the issues on the first server by dropping in an Intel card I had lying around pretty much straight away, so never got to the bottom of it.

      It took the second server (and, luckily, not clicking on jumbo frames immediately) that pointed to the problem … oh, and only having 1 PCI slot to play with.

      I’m guessing then the first piece of advice is this:

      1. Turn off jumbo frames on all systems in the chain (whatever the NIC or OS) … and try again .. all because it has worked so far does not mean it will going forward.

  • Sarge

    I have a issue streaming from a WHS on a Gigabit network over 802.11n wifi to a macbook pro.
    After a few minutes I lose all connection to the WHS, cannot ping it or connect to any share or RDP.
    The WHS is fine though, if I boot the Mac into Windows 7 I get fine playback over Wifi but occasional pause after 15 or so minutes.
    I will look at the Jumbo frames setting for the windows side of things.

  • Diesel

    Well, after a week of use, I still have intermittent problems. Lately, it seems to work fine until I hit pause on the MCE. When I hit play, it stutters, even if I select a new show, until I reboot the Pavillion.

  • Jim

    Jim I totally agree with you "copy a movie to my media player" this is what I have been doing for years. I have owned all of the EX series computers and even the EX495 streams choppy video. I have no clue how HP sells this for streaming for I have never gotten it to work even though I have a gig network/router etc. all my movies chop now and then.
    Like you I would like to use my EX495 to stream movies so I hope you keep this topic open and HP and Microsoft look into this "Problem".

  • Tim

    I've read on multiple sources that NFS is ideally for streaming with minimal overhead. Anyone tried the NFS protocol to check if it improves any of the issues you describe?
    I have the same issue when streaming, but all my video is stored on my NMT anyway so I don't have a big issue with it.

  • Dan

    Just need to post my two cents, I've yet to have any issues (aside from DTS audio) streaming video. Setup consist of gig lan dir-655, EX485, and PS3 (all wired connection). I first started streaming stright VOB rips using twonkey, and moved up to PS3 media server in preparation for the new media player coming out. I've even stremed vob rips using twonky straight to my samsung tv with out issue, expect the one flaw on my TV that does not allow you to adjust the aspect ration of the video. I'm not expert on this stuff and I do have jumbo frame enabled on the EX485, the MTU is set to 1500 on the PS3.

    I've even had good luck streaming to my wife's laptop using a G connection.

    I've got a popbox on preorder and will post more info should sybase actually deliever it, lol.

  • blair

    my windows media centre would stutter constantly streaming from a net gear readynas. I added a intel NIC (the board has realtek lan) and if completely fixed the problem. realtek is rubbish.