stuttering, bluray, annomolly - for me anyway... help

[toony]

I have been at this for over 2 weeks.

I have backed up many blurays and watched them through my HD100 extender fine. mkv, ts, m2ts
However the Bourne Identity is stuttering like mad.

It plays fine in windows media player but when I try and play it in the sage on the server it won't, it starts then the movie just goes away after a second.

I have tried the following;

had it as a ts, m2ts and now a mkv, it's VC1 with AC3
Upgraded sage to 6.59
upgraded extender to newest beta
upgraded my D-link DIR-655 Gigabit router to latest firmare
upgraded all my hardware ( listed in my signature below)
Checked all drives are 64 clusters, they are
done network tests - all good
tried all different codecs and settings in sage setup, I have gone through countless threades here and tried many different ideas.
Changed the buffer size in the registry.

and on and on

I am at a point that if getting an HD200 will solve this then I will get one.
I have other blurays at 1080p mkv, VC-1 AC3 that play without any issues.
I am at my ropes end here with this I can't for the life of me think of anything. I am sorry if I left out any info, my brain is fried over this one.

Any help would be appreciated.

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by toony

upgraded my D-link DIR-655 Gigabit router to latest firmare

Any chance of stringing some cat5/6 across the room(s) as a test to see if taking the wireless variable out the equation fixes things before bailing on the HD-100?

[toony]

It is cat 6e... no wireless

[Lucas]

I think your best bet is the HD200.

[toony]

Done.

Just ordered an HD200.

Cheers

[SWKerr]

I had some strange issue with converting that disc. Sage would play the file fine after it went thru TSmuxer but when I tired to convert the audio in MEGUI it came out in slowmo. I was eventually able to get it converted but it was an effort. I think there is something different about that disc.

[toony]

There are a few discs that certainly make you bang your head against the keyboard. This one however was the first one to stutter. I never got it fixed, though I find it odd that the subtites, the forced ones anyway worked once I upgraded to the extender beta.

[Taddeusz]

For those that don't know eac3to is a great little utility for converting audio around. It's also quite useful for getting a VC1 video track into an MKV container.

[toony]

Tried that too, here is what I tried;

I did not make any changes to video VC-1 ever

m2ts dirrecty from disc no changes
m2ts DTS-HD -> AC3, VC-1
m2ts DTS-HD -> DTS, VC-1

ts demuxed
ts DTS-HD -> AC3, VC-1
ts DTS-HD -> DTS, VC-1

mkv DTS-HD -> AC3, VC-1
mkv DTS-HD -> DTS, VC-1

Subs, took them out, left them in.

I dunno.

[SWKerr]

Did you try one with just the video to if it skipped?

[Taddeusz]

I know a lot of people frown on the practice because it reduces the quality but I transcode my BD rips to H.264. The process I go through I use eac3to to copy the video to mkv and de-mux all the audio tracks.

For the audio depending on what is available in the movie I'll use eac3to to convert the resulting FLAC audio to a 640Kb AC3 track, extract the AC3 core or use the already available AC3 5.1 track.

For the video I use MeGUI to transcode the video to an MP4. I use a CRF of 26 which yields a video in the 3GB-7GB range depending on content. If there are subtitles I use (I think, not at home right now) SupRip to convert the subtitles to SRT. Then I insert a line into the AVS script to use vobsub to render those subs into the video. They come out looking pretty nice.

Then I'll mux everything into an MKV file using MKVMerge. Not exactly a one-click process but it works.

The main reason I personally transcode is that BD video is really a ridiculous bitrate. It really doesn't need to be that high to look that good. So reducing the footprint per movie to a more reasonable size is key for me. For me the loss of quality is not that noticeable and the resulting file is more likely playable on my HD100 due to the lower bitrate.

Even an HD video that is reduced in quality is light years better than an unconverted SD video.

[toony]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

Did you try one with just the video to if it skipped?

I did, and it skipped. I thought it was an audio issue at first but alas it wasn't.

[toony]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I know a lot of people frown on the practice because it reduces the quality but I transcode my BD rips to H.264.

I am one of those people. I am not concerned with disc space and the time it takes to transcode is so long it's crazy. Also I am a video snob, I want the best I can get.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by toony

I am one of those people. I am not concerned with disc space and the time it takes to transcode is so long it's crazy. Also I am a video snob, I want the best I can get.

To each their own. I see people complaining about their full BD rips playing back with stutters on their HD100 all the time. I don't think the decoder chip is capable of such high bitrates. From anecdotal evidence it appears that anything over 9-10Mb for the video stream is too much for the HD100 to handle properly. I've actually had trouble with MKV's that have more than one audio track. Remove one or more of the audio tracks and they play fine. But there seems to be a total container bitrate ceiling where once you reach it you get stuttery playback.

I've never had any problems with any of my transcoded rips, even ones that have a full frame 1920x1080 resolution. Only with attempting to playback full rips. The HD200 might be different but I think full BD rips are just too much data for the HD100 to handle.

[toony]

Your probably right, I have in the past had to remux a few times to get things right. I think one thing that helps is a gigabit network at the very least cat5.

Oh well, tiss the price you pay to be at the edge of technology, that's obtainable for a few grand

I ordered the HD200 and hope it helps. The extra HD100 will be dispatched to the bedroom and the wife, she's happy with her 100.

[toony]

Well all is good, the stuttering is good. The HD200 seems to have done the trick... an expensive fix but a fix none the less.

[comet48]

Originally Posted by toony

Well all is good, the stuttering is good. The HD200 seems to have done the trick... an expensive fix but a fix none the less.

I have an hd-200, and my experience is that with 1080P mkv files, I get some stuttering. I have a cat5 link. The server is a quadcore 6600 with 4gB ram plus another 2gB ram disk, and 1.5 tB disks, so it's not the server and not the net.

720P is never a problem.

[_Demo_]

Originally Posted by comet48

I have an hd-200, and my experience is that with 1080P mkv files, I get some stuttering. I have a cat5 link. The server is a quadcore 6600 with 4gB ram plus another 2gB ram disk, and 1.5 tB disks, so it's not the server and not the net.

720P is never a problem.

Which transfer method are you using to play back the files?

_Demo_

[comet48]

Not quite sure what you mean by the question. It's over a local Lan.

[_Demo_]

Originally Posted by comet48

Not quite sure what you mean by the question. It's over a local Lan.

Are you streaming it in extender mode from a hard drive directly in the server? Very high bitrate files can have issues on network shares.

_Demo_