[agogley]

I've been doing some upgrades on my network. I've been using Western Digital's MyBookLive as my servers of choice. I started out with just one and eventually got to two 3TB units. My network runs through a DLink DGL-4500 router. I use Dune's HD Smart D1 as my media player.


So I just added one of Western Digitals MyCloud which is their newest version of the MyBookLive. It's much faster so I was expecting an improvement in response times. Instead, what I got, is video jitters, stuttering, or whatever you want to call it.


At first I thought maybe I had a corrupted unit. It passes the self test but perhaps a sector went bad or something. But I got a new one and it stutters during the movie too. I've been using The Avengers (2012) as my test movie and it is stored as a BD ISO. I copied the movie over to my older MyBookLive and the movie plays fine on the Dune player from that location. The movie also plays fine on my PC from both the new MyCloud and the older MyBookLive.


I enabled "Fast SMB access" and it seemed to reduce the jittering but not completely. So there is something going on between the new MyCloud and the Dune. I'm running the latest beta firmware on the Dune (and going back to a non-beta doesn't seem to affect the problem).


I can really only point to two possible problems. Incompatibility between the MyCloud and the Dune for whatever reason or the router. The latter seems hard to believe considering the movie streams fine to the PC and the older MyBookLive seems to stream it fine as well.


Any ideas?

 

[mrfattbill]

Have you tried any other movies/anything not in ISO?


Bill

 

[agogley]

I've tried other movies. I did get jitters/stutter on other movies.


All of my movies are in ISO format.


The reason why I stuck with the one movie is because I was able to copy that file over to my older MyBookLive for testing purposes. It plays perfectly from there. And it plays perfectly from either NAS to my PC.


I'll try some other ISOs when I get a chance. Maybe the smaller ones will play fine? I don't know. But why would larger ones play better on an older NAS running through the same router, the same switch, etc? (although to be fair I did connect the media player and the server directly to the router and there was no improvement).

 

[agogley]

I tested two other ISOs. Sahara and A Knight's Tale. Both had jitter/stutter issues although not nearly as noticeable or as often as the much larger movie The Avengers.

 

[mrfattbill]



Quote:
Originally Posted by agogley  /t/1521263/video-jittering-network-server-or-player-problem/0_50#post_24446793


I tested two other ISOs. Sahara and A Knight's Tale. Both had jitter/stutter issues although not nearly as noticeable or as often as the much larger movie The Avengers.

Try copying something from the WDCloud to your desktop and see what kind of transfer speeds you get.


Bill

 

[agogley]

I transferred an ISO. I got 75 MB/s. +/-


Faster than my older MybookLive by quite a bit. Interestingly I get a much slower speed when copy and pasting to the drive at the same time (copying an ISO from the drive and pasting it in another directory on the same drive).

 

[Kelson]



Quote:
Originally Posted by agogley  /t/1521263/video-jittering-network-server-or-player-problem/0_100#post_24446562


I've been doing some upgrades on my network. I've been using Western Digital's MyBookLive as my servers of choice. I started out with just one and eventually got to two 3TB units. My network runs through a DLink DGL-4500 router.

At one time I was having network issues that drove me up a wall too. That included stuttering that was affected by whether devices were plugged into GigE or Fast Ethernet. The best thing I did was to take another posters advice that the switches you get in a router are generally not up to snuff for high bandwidth uses. I standardized on Netgear business-class GS108 switches (8 port, GigE). My servers are all plugged into a GS108 that is the main hub and the router is plugged in as well as just a device (I only use the switch ports on the router for the network printers which is low bandwidth and saves ports on the GS108). At my main viewing area, I have another GS108. All the media devices (Live-SMP, TiVo, HDTV, BD Player, etc.) are plugged into the GS108 which feeds back to the main GS108. In other viewing locations where I have only 2 or 3 network devices, I use a GS105 (5-port). So I have a GigE star network of a main hub switch and satellite switches where all the switches are the same and good quality. This eliminated all my backbone stuttering problems.


Everything worked fine until I put in a new Media-PC as a server for my BD's. The stuttering started again, but I knew it had to be the server and most probably an issue with the protocol stack. A NIC driver upgrade to make it fully compatible with Win-7 Pro fixed it completely.

 

[agogley]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelson  /t/1521263/video-jittering-network-server-or-player-problem#post_24447497


At one time I was having network issues that drove me up a wall too. That included stuttering that was affected by whether devices were plugged into GigE or Fast Ethernet. The best thing I did was to take another posters advice that the switches you get in a router are generally not up to snuff for high bandwidth uses. I standardized on Netgear business-class GS108 switches (8 port, GigE). My servers are all plugged into a GS108 that is the main hub and the router is plugged in as well as just a device (I only use the switch ports on the router for the network printers which is low bandwidth and saves ports on the GS108). At my main viewing area, I have another GS108. All the media devices (Live-SMP, TiVo, HDTV, BD Player, etc.) are plugged into the GS108 which feeds back to the main GS108. In other viewing locations where I have only 2 or 3 network devices, I use a GS105 (5-port). So I have a GigE star network of a main hub switch and satellite switches where all the switches are the same and good quality. This eliminated all my backbone stuttering problems.


Everything worked fine until I put in a new Media-PC as a server for my BD's. The stuttering started again, but I knew it had to be the server and most probably an issue with the protocol stack. A NIC driver upgrade to make it fully compatible with Win-7 Pro fixed it completely.

I was starting to think that replacing my router and switches were the next obvious route. I use the D-Link 5-Port Gigabit Switch (DGS-1005G) for my local switches (that is a line comes out of a wall in a particular room and then all the devices get plugged into that switch). But my main switch may not be gigabit...I'd have to open the closet and pull it out.


Unfortunately, I can't replace the NIC since the NAS is a over the counter buy (Western Digital MyCloud). Plus, I have a tough time imagining that the NIC in the new MyClouds are worse than the one they used in the 2 year old MyBookLive (note: the MyCloud is just the updated version of the MyBookLive).

 

[agogley]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelson  /t/1521263/video-jittering-network-server-or-player-problem#post_24447497


At one time I was having network issues that drove me up a wall too. That included stuttering that was affected by whether devices were plugged into GigE or Fast Ethernet. The best thing I did was to take another posters advice that the switches you get in a router are generally not up to snuff for high bandwidth uses. I standardized on Netgear business-class GS108 switches (8 port, GigE). My servers are all plugged into a GS108 that is the main hub and the router is plugged in as well as just a device (I only use the switch ports on the router for the network printers which is low bandwidth and saves ports on the GS108). At my main viewing area, I have another GS108. All the media devices (Live-SMP, TiVo, HDTV, BD Player, etc.) are plugged into the GS108 which feeds back to the main GS108. In other viewing locations where I have only 2 or 3 network devices, I use a GS105 (5-port). So I have a GigE star network of a main hub switch and satellite switches where all the switches are the same and good quality. This eliminated all my backbone stuttering problems.


Everything worked fine until I put in a new Media-PC as a server for my BD's. The stuttering started again, but I knew it had to be the server and most probably an issue with the protocol stack. A NIC driver upgrade to make it fully compatible with Win-7 Pro fixed it completely.

I've been running some other tests. From my Dune media player I ran "read test" or something like that where the player reads the file only. On the new MyCloud I got an average of under 10 MB/s. Sometimes it was as low as 7 or 8, but usually stuck at or near 10MB/s. I then read the same file from my older NAS and I got a steady 11 MB/s with the slowest at 10MB/s.


I decided that there is something seriously screwy with that. I downloaded a NAS tester (NAS performance tester 1.7). I ran a test on both. Initially I got a average read rate of 5.25 MB/s on the new drive. Huh? The write time average up near 70 MB/s. However, I ran the test again and could not duplicate the poor performance. Later tests had 46 MB/s read and 70+ MB/s write. Seems odd to me that write performance is twice what read performance is.


I ran the same test on the older drives. They gave me 25 MB/s average or higher on write and 38-42 read. That's what I would expect.


Ok, so now I'm running larger file tests and I'm getting 64 MB/s write and 70 MB/s read on the new drive. Seriously...what the heck?

 

[Kelson]

It is not unheard of for the budget NAS units to have higher write speed than read speed. The processor chips in the units are not very powerful and I think the manufacturers assume that the primary use will be for backup so they slant the performance in that direction. I have a pair of D-Link DNS321 4TB NAS units that I use for DVD.iso. When I send a file from my desktop PC to the NAS, the write speed is 14-15MBps. When I go the other way and try to read it back the read speed is 6-7Mbps -- which is why I only use it for DVD.iso.


In contrast, my I3 based Media-PC (for BluRay) reads and writes BD.m2ts to my desktop at 110MBPS.

 

[agogley]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelson  /t/1521263/video-jittering-network-server-or-player-problem#post_24449108


It is not unheard of for the budget NAS units to have higher write speed than read speed. The processor chips in the units are not very powerful and I think the manufacturers assume that the primary use will be for backup so they slant the performance in that direction. I have a pair of D-Link DNS321 4TB NAS units that I use for DVD.iso. When I send a file from my desktop PC to the NAS, the write speed is 14-15MBps. When I go the other way and try to read it back the read speed is 6-7Mbps -- which is why I only use it for DVD.iso.


In contrast, my I3 based Media-PC (for BluRay) reads and writes BD.m2ts to my desktop at 110MBPS.

Well when I ran the test some more, the read time did end up being equal to the write time. Still cannot figure out why the Dune wont play it.


I also checked my primary switch. It is a cheap gigabit switch but gigabit nonetheless.

 

[agogley]

Ok, I extracted the ISO to a regular BD playlist. It still had problems.


The ISO plays perfectly from the old server. So what is it about the new MyCloud? Other than being faster, I wonder what the heck is causing this difference.