Mkv stutter / judder disgusting behaviour!

Just want to say I am totally disgusted with the mkv stutter not being addressed. It was reported back in November 2011 and still no joy. Seriously how long is it going to take.
Is it going to be addressed in next firmware and when is the next release. I think we have a right to know considering we did purchase the product!

3 Likes

Exactly which issue are you talking about? Ā (Post a link)

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming-Issue/MKV-Full-HD-Stutter/idi-p/286900

Hi Julius02,

Iā€™m with you on this. Iā€™ve been complaining on this forum about these MKV 1080p issues for months. The SMP has never been able to handle 1080p mkvā€™s at 24p. I got mine at christmas and gave my old WDTV Live to a friend in need, and I havenā€™t been able to watch 1080p movies since. My friend, who got my old WDTV Live, is watching his 1080p movies without hickups.

WD knows about these issues, of course, but they donā€™t care to fix them. They are more busy implementing all sorts of streaming services, so they can stick their respective logos on the box, for marketing purposes. These streaming service apps are often poorly implemented, so they busy themselves fixing them instead of fixing these basic playback issues. I guess they are under some kind of legal threats from the lawyers of these streaming services, or something, and they choose to serve them before giving their customers what they paid for.

Another thing thatā€™s almost amusing. They seem to think that their customers are WDā€™s very own team of beta testers. Thatā€™s not what I signed up for. I bought this player thinking that it at least performed as well as the former model, and because I was very tired of the former modelā€™s inability to auto select framerate. A basic feature they finally introduced in this SMP. I they called it the BMP (Beta Media Player) instead of SMP, I wouldnā€™t have bought it. How dare they expect us to spend our time collecting bug reports for them? They even sent me a mail about this ā€œgreat dealā€ where I get to test their faulty products, apparently for nothing.

My guess is that they wonā€™t fix any of these issues. The SMP is halfway through its product cycle. They are already busy making the next beta bug box.

Lately Iā€™ve been thinking that if WD wonā€™t listen to their own customers, maybe they would listen to some bad publicity in the gadget press. Maybe an embarrassing headline on engadget.com could motivate them to fix stuff? I donā€™t know.

By the way. Can anyone recommend another product that can actually play 1080p MKVā€™s at 23.98/24fps via smb shares?

I have only tried Ā ā€œ720Pā€ Ā MKV with this player and only with extern HDD so far and 95% of them plays flawlessly without hickups and they are 23.976fps files. However 24fps mkvā€™s will have stutter every 41 sec which is quite annoying and i read somewhere that gen 1 or gen 2 could play 24fps if im not mistaken so it would be great if WD could fix this and have better MKV / MP4 support overall.

1 Like

Leverbrus wrote:

 

By the way. Can anyone recommend another product that can actually play 1080p MKVā€™s at 23.98/24fps via smb shares?

Yeah, any of the WDTV Lives.

After WD fixed the MKV bug I reported (the 2nd-most top-voted issue), I havenā€™t had any problems with full-HD MKVsā€¦

Itā€™s possible youā€™ve run into a switch performance issue.

Read this analysis of someone over at the AVS forums reporting the same thing ā€“ It quite likely a low-end switch thatā€™s causing the problem.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=22006530#post22006530

Start there and read down through post 1751. ā€” Started by ā€œWDFanā€ and verified by ā€œjsinco.ā€

Gig switches with small packet buffers donā€™t work well with the WDTV.   

I have the same switches WDFan refers to (Netgear GS108Tv2) and I have no problems streaming 40-50 mbit/sec 1080p MKVs via Sambaā€¦

Leverbrus wrote:

 

WD knows about these issues, of course, but they donā€™t care to fix them. ā€¦ My guess is that they wonā€™t fix any of these issues. 

8 of the top-10 issue reports are fixed.   So that tends to indicate your opinion is wrong.

TonyPh12345 wrote:

Yeah, any of the WDTV Lives.

 

After WD fixed the MKV bug I reported (the 2nd-most top-voted issue), I havenā€™t had any problems with full-HD MKVsā€¦

 

Itā€™s possible youā€™ve run into a switch performance issue.

 

Read this analysis of someone over at the AVS forums reporting the same thing ā€“ It quite likely a low-end switch thatā€™s causing the problem.

 

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=22006530#post22006530

 

Start there and read down through post 1751. ā€” Started by ā€œWDFanā€ and verified by ā€œjsinco.ā€

 

Gig switches with small packet buffers donā€™t work well with the WDTV.   

 

I have the same switches WDFan refers to (Netgear GS108Tv2) and I have no problems streaming 40-50 mbit/sec 1080p MKVs via Sambaā€¦

 

Just registered to this forum, because the bug that WayneJJ described in his original post on the ā€œIssuesā€ forum definitely is not solved with the latest firmware. May be that WD solved another studdering that has been caused by a bandwidth problem, but there still is a studder/judder problem with nearly all of my MKVs using the VC-1 codecā€¦ and only with the ones encoded in VC-1 and stored in an MKV containerā€¦ h264/AVC in MKV is working fine and VC-1 in e.g. m2ts is ok as well (Iā€™d remux my MKVs to m2ts to get them working, but unfortunately MKV is the only container that supports chapters).

Some movies show a sporadic studder (in intervals of 2 to 15 seconds) but always at reproduceable frames (e.g. all three titles of the Matrix triology) and the worst MKV is ā€œThe Golden Compassā€, which studders all the way through each and every secondā€¦ but only on the WD TV Live and (like already written by WayneJJ in the original ) not only when streaming via ethernet but also with a HDD connected directly to the WD TV Live via USB. This bug is not bandwith/network related!

I know that itā€™s hard to focus on the original issue of WayneJJ as long as there are other forum members who will mix up totally different things and either say ā€œI have exactly the same problem, but totally differentā€ or like Leverbrus in this thread, who first redirects this thread into a 1080p24 direction and Rob78 who joins in and states that his 720p 23.976 movies are playing flawlesslyā€¦ WayneJJ never mentioned a resolution or a frame rate but only the VC-1 in an MKV container as cause of this issue. He also never mentioned network streaming but a HDD, so no change of switch/buffersize/networkcable/WLAN will help to solve (t)his problem.

Is it so hard not to mix up everything and only read and comment what has been written?

Regards

Sotje

Can I ask you to post a mediainfo report of one of the problem files. Iā€™m interested to see how it compares with the files causing problems on my unit.
Just to let u know I was having problems with 4 filesā€¦ These were encoded using 24fps. I changed my video output to 1080p 60hz and these files played back perfectly.
I have reported the issue as a 24fps bug. I am not convinced it is video/ audio codec related. I have even tried high bitrate files using a different frame rate and they play superbly. When you use these same codec and 24fps and similar bitrateā€¦ Problems arise!

@sotje

Amen to that my brother. Amen.

Youā€™re so absolutely right. Itā€™s the VC-1 codec in an MKV container that causes the stutter/judder problem. But as long as WD refuses to see this as the problem it will never be solved.

julius02 wrote:
Can I ask you to post a mediainfo report of one of the problem files. Iā€™m interested to see how it compares with the files causing problems on my unit.
Just to let u know I was having problems with 4 filesā€¦ These were encoded using 24fps. I changed my video output to 1080p 60hz and these files played back perfectly.
I have reported the issue as a 24fps bug. I am not convinced it is video/ audio codec related. I have even tried high bitrate files using a different frame rate and they play superbly. When you use these same codec and 24fps and similar bitrateā€¦ Problems arise!

Sureā€¦

General
Unique ID                                : 206221442086853706717763889268428139169
Complete name                            : The Golden Compass.mkv
Format                                   : Matroska
Format version                           : Version 2
File size                                : 22.9 GiB
Duration                                 : 1h 53mn
Overall bit rate mode                    : Variable
Overall bit rate                         : 29.0 Mbps
Movie name                               : Der goldene Kompass
Writing application                      : mkvmerge v5.4.0 (ā€˜Piperā€™) built on Mar 10 2012 13:34:39
Writing library                          : libebml v1.2.3 + libmatroska v1.3.0

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : VC-1
Format profile                           : Advanced@L3
Codec ID                                 : WVC1
Codec ID/Hint                            : Microsoft
Duration                                 : 1h 53mn
Bit rate                                 : 24.8 Mbps
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate                               : 23.976 fps
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.498
Stream size                              : 19.6 GiB (86%)
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No

Audio #1
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : DTS
Format/Info                              : Digital Theater Systems
Format profile                           : MA / Core
Codec ID                                 : A_DTS
Duration                                 : 1h 53mn
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 1 576 Kbps / 1 510 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 6 channels
Channel positions                        : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth                                : 24 bits
Compression mode                         : Lossless / Lossy
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No

Audio #2
ID                                       : 3
Format                                   : DTS
Format/Info                              : Digital Theater Systems
Format profile                           : MA / Core
Codec ID                                 : A_DTS
Duration                                 : 1h 53mn
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 2 029 Kbps / 1 510 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 8 channels / 6 channels
Channel positions                        : Front: L C R, Side: L R, Back: L R, LFE / Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth                                : 24 bits
Compression mode                         : Lossless / Lossy
Default                                  : No
Forced                                   : No

Menu
00:00:00.000                             : :Chapter 01 (00:00:00)
00:04:40.822                             : :Chapter 02 (00:04:40)
00:08:52.532                             : :Chapter 03 (00:08:52)
00:13:05.702                             : :Chapter 04 (00:13:05)
00:18:58.596                             : :Chapter 05 (00:18:58)
00:21:58.943                             : :Chapter 06 (00:21:58)
00:29:15.587                             : :Chapter 07 (00:29:15)
00:33:41.269                             : :Chapter 08 (00:33:41)
00:39:41.170                             : :Chapter 09 (00:39:41)
00:45:29.644                             : :Chapter 10 (00:45:29)
00:48:13.641                             : :Chapter 11 (00:48:13)
00:54:01.822                             : :Chapter 12 (00:54:01)
00:59:55.550                             : :Chapter 13 (00:59:55)
01:08:10.044                             : :Chapter 14 (01:08:10)
01:14:12.114                             : :Chapter 15 (01:14:12)
01:21:31.678                             : :Chapter 16 (01:21:31)
01:24:43.829                             : :Chapter 17 (01:24:43)
01:33:26.059                             : :Chapter 18 (01:33:26)
01:39:27.211                             : :Chapter 19 (01:39:27)
01:43:08.974                             : :Chapter 20 (01:43:08)

Iā€™ve just played a VC1 MKV file (1080p with TrueHD audio) and although it starts off juddering, after a few seconds it calms down and is fine for the rest.

I used the 1080p 24fps setting.

(Just wanted to add that it canā€™t be *all* VC1 encoded MKVā€™s)

I need to go sift thru my BD collection to see if I can find any that are VC-1 and 24.000 fps.

EDIT: Ā Hmmm. Ā Not a one. Ā  All of the rips I have (that are passthrough of the original M2TSs) are AVC / 23.976 fpsā€¦ Ā 

Iā€™ll have to go pull out the original media and see if I can find something else.

Couldnā€™t agree more with the original poster. I have a Gen 2 WDTV and it plays high bitrate MKVā€™s just fine. This new 3rd gen version has issues. Iā€™m wondering if It doesnā€™t have something to do with reference framesā€¦

Zwaarpoot wrote:

Youā€™re so absolutely right. Itā€™s the VC-1 codec in an MKV container that causes the stutter/judder problem.

Not on 23.976, works fine for me.

TonyPh12345 wrote:

I need to go sift thru my BD collection to see if I can find any that are VC-1 and 24.000 fps.

 

EDIT:  Hmmm.  Not a one.   All of the rips I have (that are passthrough of the original M2TSs) are AVC / 23.976 fpsā€¦  

 

Iā€™ll have to go pull out the original media and see if I can find something else.

 

Did you have a look at the mediainfo I posted yesterday? VC-1 23.976 fpsā€¦ the Matrix triology I mentioned is VC-1 23.976 fps and has studderung as well. I cannot even tell if  the problem shows up at 24.000 fps at all, as I donā€™t have any VC-1 at 24.000 fps, too.

Techflaws wrote:

Not on 23.976, works fine for me.

Just because it is working for you doesnā€™t neccessarily mean that it is working for the rest of the worldā€¦ itā€™s like just because there are smokers that are 90 years old doesnā€™t neccessarily mean that smoking isnā€™t harmful :wink:

I cannot do more more than tell

  • that I have exactly the same problems like WayneJJ described in his original post,
  • that there are at least some other people who do have this issue as well
  • that I only have it with passed through BD 1080p VC-1 23,976 fps streams in MKV containers on both network streaming and HDD directly connected to the USB.

I understand your frustration. Iā€™m sure we all feel the same as the issue is occurring obviously with us all at some level.
Have you tried playing the suspect files back at 1080p 60hz? This solved my problem with problematic files.
I am not taking any sides but I am just reporting my findings; I too have no issues with many vc1 codec mkv at 23.976fps using auto resolution and auto frame rate.
Like I said all the ones that do give me problems, when I switch to 1080p 60hz they play nicely.
I am beginning to think it is more a problem with the unit and how it deals with frame rate; doesnā€™t make sense that some play fine at 23.976 using vc1 codec yet others donā€™t.
Also seems bit of a coincidence that some 24fps files cause the stutter too

This is aĀ  VC-1 1080p24 sample.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?0452y68epbifgsm

For me it judders when played with the screen set to 60Hz, but works when the screen is set to 24p.

schwurbel wrote:

This is a  VC-1 1080p24 sample.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?0452y68epbifgsm

For me it judders when played with the screen set to 60Hz, but works when the screen is set to 24p.

I can confirm mine plays this file perfectly and never had a single issue with any MKVā€™s even ones that have a higher bitrate than this file.

I have a model that ends on -00 and played it a 24 & 60 through direct USB or WIFI from my NAS.
I see judder only when set to 60 but I always use Auto Match FR so thats not a big deal to me.

[EDIT]

I have Hot Fuzz VC-1 MKV thats 25.1gb and has a bitrate of 29.1Mbs playing at 24hz & 60hz with no stuttering or judders through USB will try from my NAS next.

sadly this is my hightes bitrate VC-1 MKV most others are all AVCā€¦

Ripcord83 wrote:

 

I have a model that ends on -00

Mineā€™s a -01.

The sample you have posted, plays fine on my unitā€¦ using auto resolution and match frame rate and also selecting 1080p 24 mode. Are you using the latest firmware? I am playing files back using hard drive only, no network shares.

I can confirm that i have no problems with my vc-1 rips (23.976fps), these play flawlessly.

Only issue i seem to be having are ones ripped @ 24fps with avc codec

I would also like to add that i am playing back files with a bitrate as high as 30mbps successfully too, no problems in that area.

An experiment i carried out was to use mkvmerge for the problematic 24fps files, i changed the frame rate to 23.976 and they play perfectly. I also used tsmuxer to remux to. m2ts and that played perfectly, this was with leaving the frame rate to the original 24fps. It seems to be a bug with mkv @ 24fps.

Interestingly i had one particular file Ā ripped using .mp4 that stuttered badly (23.976fps); i used mkvmerge and ensured header compression was set to none and that now plays flawlessly.

I did try header compression set to none on the problematic mkv file at 24fps but this made no difference, file still stutters.

When i say stutter, i mean the frequent loss of frame - jerkyness.