Poor streaming connection/speed

Weevil wrote:
I'm worried that it's the player's handling of LAN traffic that's at fault

The NAS "average read throughput" number is helpful, but it's not enough. Without a better picture of the traffic between the NAS and the player, it's hard (for me, anyway) to say where the problem is or predict what change would produce the largest improvement.

(And by the way... Once you've posted a question and received a response, it's probably better to ask your next question in a new post rather than changing the original question in your old post. Editing the old post can make it hard for other readers to follow the conversation.)

StephenB... Thanks for the mediainfo link. Bedtime here at the moment, so I'll post info when I next get the chance. I'll check the player and see if it's using SMB or NFS.

fastfwd... Thanks for your help - Hopefully the info from mediainfo will provide a better picture?
Cheers,

Stephen

StephenB... Thanks for the suggestion; the tvix was using SMB, so I changed it to NFS, but I couldn't see any improvement in the file playback. The file is a mkv from a Bluray. Details below;

fastfwd... Sorry about the confusion over my post last night. I posted, then immediately started editing it to get my thoughts into order... you must have replied while I was still editing. Sorry! My thinking (that I 'edited out') was that if the Powerlines were causing a drop of >70% of the NAS speed, then maybe an increase in the NAS speed from the current 25MB/s could lead to a higher speed than the current 6.9 MB/s by the time it's gone through the Powerlines... maybe bringing it up to Bluray capability.

Am I right in thinking I have two issues - 1) the player cannot cope with the throughput needed through its LAN port (although it can via USB2). And 2) even with a player with a capable LAN port, the current drop down to 6.9 MB/s means that the NAS needs to be tweaked (somehow?!) to bring this up? Any other thoughts?


mediainfo.....

UniqueID/String : 223939786542345061800280457564165362706 (0xA8793BEBA0F34068B76A5F43FC45D412)
CompleteName : \\NAS-BE-92-17\media\movie\TV\Firefly\01 - Serenity.mkv
Format : Matroska
Format_Version : Version 2
FileSize/String : 15.2 GiB
Duration/String : 1h 26mn
OverallBitRate_Mode/String : Variable
OverallBitRate/String : 25.0 Mbps
Encoded_Date : UTC 2014-03-09 17:24:29
Encoded_Application : libmatroska built on Aug 28 2013 17:28:01
Encoded_Library/String : libebml v1.2.0 + libmatroska v1.1.0

Video
ID/String : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format_Profile : High@L4.1
Format_Settings_CABAC/String : Yes
Format_Settings_RefFrames/String : 3 frames
CodecID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration/String : 1h 26mn
Width/String : 1 920 pixels
Height/String : 1 080 pixels
DisplayAspectRatio/String : 16:9
FrameRate_Mode/String : Constant
FrameRate/String : 23.976 fps
ColorSpace : YUV
ChromaSubsampling : 4:2:0
BitDepth/String : 8 bits
ScanType/String : Progressive
Language/String : English
Default/String : Yes
Forced/String : No

Audio #1
ID/String : 2
Format : DTS
Format/Info : Digital Theater Systems
Format_Profile : MA / Core
Format_Settings_Mode : 16
Format_Settings_Endianness : Big
CodecID : A_DTS
Duration/String : 1h 26mn
BitRate_Mode/String : Variable
BitRate/String : Unknown / 1 509 Kbps
Channel(s)/String : 6 channels
ChannelPositions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
SamplingRate/String : 48.0 KHz
BitDepth/String : 24 bits
Compression_Mode/String : Lossless / Lossy
Video_Delay/String : 1mn 5s
Language/String : English
Default/String : Yes
Forced/String : No

Audio #2
ID/String : 3
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Format_Settings_ModeExtension : CM (complete main)
Format_Settings_Endianness : Big
CodecID : A_AC3
Duration/String : 1h 26mn
BitRate_Mode/String : Constant
BitRate/String : 224 Kbps
Channel(s)/String : 6 channels
Channel(s)_Original/String : 2 channels
ChannelPositions : Front: L R
SamplingRate/String : 48.0 KHz
BitDepth/String : 16 bits
Compression_Mode/String : Lossy
Video_Delay/String : 1mn 5s
StreamSize/String : 139 MiB (1%)
Language/String : English
Default/String : Yes
Forced/String : No

Thanks for sharing the mediainfo. It looks like it should play on a bluray capable player.

I agree you have more than one issue, but I wouldn't frame them quite that way.

(a) The powerline performance you are getting is inadequate for Bluray. You are thinking that doubling the NAS speed might also double the powerline throughput. I'd be extremely surprised if that happens. Your powerline throughput will almost certainly remain the same.

(b) The NAS read speed on a gigabit connection is low. Note the review here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas- ... l=&start=4 Smallnetbuilder measured ~85 MB/s read speed. So you should be seeing a speed that is at least in the 70s. 25 MB/s is fast enough for BluRay, but something isn't right. How full is the NAS? Have you looked at the NAS SMART stats?

(c) On the player's network playback - it is quite possible that the player can't quite keep up with this particular file. One thing you could try is to set up a network share on your laptop, and co-locate it with the player (using ethernet, not wifi or powerline). Then try to play the file on the twix, using the laptop as the source. If that fails, then you have ruled out the NAS as the cause.

Another thing you could try is to convert the MKV to an M2TS, and see if the twix can play that. It likely has full mpeg hardware acceleration (which includes m2ts demux), but it has to demux an MKV in software. TsMuxer is a good (and free) tool that can to this conversion. Note that conversion would preserve the existing media streams - no transcoding would be needed. So there is no quality loss. If the M2TS plays, but the MKV does not, then that also rules out the NAS.

OK, so with regards to each issue;

(a) Looks like I'll need to hardwire to stand any chance of Bluray playback with any player (at least of files with similar requirements to the file I'm testing with). I don't see the point of trying other Powerline devices when this one should deliver what I need. The plugs are on the same circuit, and it's a small house (only about 10 outlets on the ground floor) so I'm a bit disappointed... The reviews say; "we saw sustained transfers of 133.2Mbit/s - easily the fastest powerline speeds we've seen, and faster than a 10/100 Ethernet connection. The worst review I could find listed average 84.8Mbit/s... ho hum!

(b) I would like to explore this issue as it does seem slow. The Info screen of the ReadyNAS System shows all green lights. The SMART reports show no problems with any drive. Capacity; 799GB free of 5.4TB (using X-RAID2 - 4 x 2TB 'approved' Western Digital Red WD20EFRX-68AX9N0 drives).

(c) After re-ripping the file in question from Bluray to m2ts and putting it, and the original mkv on the laptop, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon trying to get my tvix to 'see' the laptop but without any success (doubtless it's me doing something wrong, or the tvix doesn't like to be connected directly to the laptop via LAN?)

Regarding the Powerlines; Netgear Genie shows the Tx and Rx between the two units as 149Mbps and 145Mbps respectively. I don't understand this as I undertand this is roughly 18MB/s ?

Can you show us what frontview shows under errors when you bring those up from the networking panel on the web? Or better if you have ssh access post the output of "ifconfig -a".

steve

Weevil wrote:
Regarding the Powerlines; Netgear Genie shows the Tx and Rx between the two units as 149Mbps and 145Mbps respectively. I don't understand this as I undertand this is roughly 18MB/s ?

Link speed is much higher than throughput for both wireless and powerline.

dsm1212... Thanks for looking in. My ReadyNAS doesn't use Frontview - it has the 'Dashboard'. There is an Information screen that shows Disc status, fan speed, temperature - all OK, and a log of events, alerts and problems. This contains the power-on and off report each day and firmware upgrade reports... all are 'green' (The only 'amber' I had was an 80% capacity information alert). I looked into the ssh access, but I'm a bit wary about doing this as a) I'm a bit of a networking noob and b) there are warnings about lack of support if you mess with it!

StephenB... Thanks for the explanation. It's a shame the software report from Genie doesn't give actual throughput, but I suppose this wouldn't 'look as good' !

There's a lot of Steves and Stephens here! Thanks guys. Any suggestion on improving the NV+v2 speed from its current 25MB/s?

Cheers,

Stephen

(a) how full is the disk volume? If it is more than 80% full, that might be part of the issue.

(b) check the SMART stats on the NAS and see if there are any errors reported.

Also, can you tell us a bit more about the PC you are using to test the NAS with? The bottleneck could possibly be there.