Blue-ray rips stuttering, possible network issue

[simonen]

I am ripping my blue-ray collection to my D-Link 321 NAS and I am noticing that they stutter quite terribly when playing back on the HD-200 in extender mode when another extender is currently watching live or recorded TV. My Sage server has a gigbit nic and my switch that everything is going through is also gigabit, as well as the NAS.

If the other extender is not currently watching recorded content, I do not have a problem with stuttering while watching the blue-ray rip.

I don't know if this has anything to do with block sizes on the NAS, but since it running linux, I don't think that was an option when I set it up.

Perhaps it is simply too much network traffic running through the server at one time.

I suppose I should try watching a blue-ray rip in stand alone mode to see if it is general network issue or if it is related to network traffic on the sage server.

I am not running large frame support on the NAS, would that make an impact or not?

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by simonen

I am not running large frame support on the NAS, would that make an impact or not?

ayup.... you'll never get anywhere near gigabit speeds without jumbo frames turned on. without jumbo frames i don't get much more than 100mb speeds. a single hd200 isnt enough to saturate a 100mb connection, but by the time you are watching 2 extenders (especaillly if you use the hdhr for recording) it could saturate a connection if you dont have jumbo frames enabled.

[Deacon Crusher]

and one should enable jumbo frames where? On the server yes, but also??

Doesn't seem like they help unless both ends of a conversation (and any switches in the middle) are all support and using Jumbo frames. Do the extenders support them? Do HDHomeruns?

thanks

[simonen]

I know my NAS does, but I don't think that my server hardware does. I found some stuff online how to turn on jumbo frames in windows xp, but those options don't seem to be available to me.

EDIT: I think it my be the NIC on my server. I just tried watching a blue-ray rip on the NAS in stand alone mode while another extender was watching something off the server and it worked fine. Went into extender mode to watch the same movie and it started to stutter.

[razrsharpe]

@Deacon: Jumbo frames need to be enabled in the software side on the nics. Also your switches need to support them. Jumbo frames are unnecessary (and not supported?) for 100mbit connections. Therefore the HDHR and HD100/200 does not need them. But to approach gigabit transfer speeds you need a nic (at both ends) and a switch that supports jumbo frames.

@simonen: go get yourself an Intel NIC for your server. Most/all other NICs are crap and not worth anything. I never use the onboard NIC and spend the extra ~$30 to put an Intel NIC in the box.

[paulbeers]

First off, you won't be able to use Jumbo Frames. Jumbo frames can only be used if ALL devices can accept/use Jumbo Frames. Since the HD100/HD200's can not, this is not an option. However, even without Jumbo frames I can still obtain 300+mbps speeds. This is more than enough to handle my multiple extenders and pc's. You may want to do a speed check on your NAS. Check out this review for the Read/Write speeds of your NAS.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/conte.../30521/75/1/3/

It appears that like most Consumer NAS storage, the read/write speeds are only "ho hum". Yes the numbers are MB/s and therefore the speeds should be capable of handling Blu-Ray, but I certainly wouldn't try pulling more than one file off of it at a time without expecting hickup.

Just some things to keep in mind.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

First off, you won't be able to use Jumbo Frames. Jumbo frames can only be used if ALL devices can accept/use Jumbo Frames. Since the HD100/HD200's can not, this is not an option.

I thought that originally too.... However, from my experience... w/o jumbo frames enabled on my server and desktop i was only pulling 110-140Mbps between them. So i figured what the heck minus as well try it so I enabled jumbo frames on the server and desktop and i was able to get 300-600Mbps. For both of these tests there was a Server (jumbo frames on or off depending on test), Desktop (Jumbo frames same as server), HD200, 2x HDHR, 2x other Laptop wireless Clients.

[simonen]

Perhaps I have a more systemic problem. My HDHR stutters on all extenders and placeshifters now. It looks like poor signal quality with drop outs and pixelation. However, it is fine on the server or using VLC.

[Beefcake550]

I think your issue is the NAS. The drives, not the network. Until I added multiple drives to my WHS setup, I had similar problems. I even created a tools call "Disk Balancing Utility" for WHS to force the spreading of media files amongst all my drives. Once this was done, I can run 3 extenders simultaneously without issue. It's only when the server is recording multiple streams (up to 3), processing some commercial skipping (fixed now to not happen while watching media), AND multiple extenders streaming do I have any problems. Neat part is that it's not really the network bandwidth, it's still limited by HD bandwidth...

-Brian

[simonen]

This instance with the HDHR was solved with a NIC driver update, since I must have corrupted something while I was messing with it last night.

The problem with the blue-ray rips is still there, but it seems to be more related to the mkv files I made using MakeMKV software from AnyDVDHD rips. However, not all of them seem to have the problem.

I think I still need to try out some different scenarios to try and pinpoint the exact problem. That said, I think you have a point about the NAS.

[DaveW42]

I would make sure you are running the latest Beta software and firmware. I would check your javaheap settings as well (set to 1024). I had stuttering problems as well until I did both of these things.

[Deacon Crusher]

Really nice basic article

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...idth,2321.html

doesn't seem like Jumbo frames are a big part of it, almost always just the speed of your disk subsystem.

[simonen]

Good article. I did some poking around and found this from microsoft. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=842264

I will give it a try tonight.

On another note, I picked up 2 1.5 TB drives and I would like to have 2 partitions on one of them. One partition for the OS (maybe 200 GB) and the rest for scheduled recordings, so I can have large block sizes. Is there really much of an issue doing this? Higher drive failure perhaps. Maybe recordings should be done to the other drive and just leave the second partion on the first drive to contents that is not viewed that often, like movies.