Possible fix for WDTV Live stutter with high bitrate on wired LAN connection

I too suffered stuttering and video stalling when trying to play full bitrate BluRay rips in MKV container. To be clear, these are MakeMKV rips, with no compression so the video files are about 25 gigs each, and their full bitrate was preserved.

Here is my setup:

DNS-321 NAS (with SMB share) --> WRT310N v2 (w/ DD-WRT firmware) --> WDTV Live

The stuttering was so unpredictable. It would stutter at some points in a movie but when I would replay that particular part of the movie later, there would be no problem whatsoever. Difficult problem to isolate when it keeps moving around.

I tried running a crossover cable directly from DNS-321 to WDTV Live. This worked without stuttering as far as I could test!
Since I was using a crossover I assigned IP addresses manually to both the WDTV Live and the DNS-321.

After I assigned the static IPs, I reinserted the router into the network path. I also then forced the DNS-321 to use 100 MBit (disabling gigabit). I did this because the WDTV Live is only 100 Mbit anyways, and I thought it would help, maybe I'm wrong.

After making these changes I haven't noticed any stuttering after playing the parts of movies where stuttering was present.

So in summary : Assign static manual IPs to the NAS and the WDTV Live, and force the NAS to use 100 Mbit instead of gigabit.

Perhaps the DNS-321 has a flakey gigabit connection, or perhaps the router doesn't like translating between a gigabit connected device and a 100 Mbit connected device. Either way it seems to be working now.

What do you guys think? Has anyone else tried something like this?

UPDATE:
I was looking for a repeatable stuttering test and I found it in this thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...php?p=17951459

Playing the Panasonic Nature file at the ~1:46 Mark, I do see some frame dropping. This is evident at other parts in that video as well. Let me say that the stuttering was not as bad as it was before I made the changes mentioned above. During that time, stuttering manifested as full-on pauses in the video, and audio cutouts. Here, w/ the Nature video demo, it's simply dropping frames. I suspect this is just due to the limited processing power of the WDTV and not because of the network.

To test this I played this video from a flash drive (USB 2.0), and the frame dropping is IDENTICAL. Thus it appears my network throughput issue has been resolved.

Furthermore, I ran another test to exonerate the NAS as the source of the problem. I played a high bitrate BluRay MKV rip to the WDTV live. At the same time I played the same file on my PC (both via SMB share). There were NO symptoms of choked network connectivity when doing this, so the 100 Mbit connection from NAS to router to WDTV. 100 Mbit was enough to serve the same movie to two places. This also suggests the read speed from the disk is pretty good, since it was reading the same file two times simultaneously, and sending out two streams.

If anyone else is still having problems give these things a try and let us know if you have similar success.

UPDATE:
Actually the stuttering occurred again later even with all those changes. I just can't pin this down. One possibility is that this latest time, there was a gigabit device connected to the router that wasn't connected before. I'll have to do some more testing. Has anyone else gotten anywhere eliminating the network stuttering?

What do you mean? You've gotten it to work, or you just tried? If it works for you, what did you have to do?