Just starting my WDTV streaming journey. I stream from a ReadyNAS and have windows shares working.
However I wonder if users have found if Linux shares provide much better performance or not? Because obviously the Readynas and WDTV both support Linux shares. However my Linux shares were not working initially (I would see the folder but when clicking on it it said there was no media). Just wonder how much time to invest in getting linux to work.
I’ll do it if it gives me much better performance…
But then I’ll have to figure out what is wrong! I was going after the files via the “folder” menu.
I also have never bothered trying out NFS from my Linux server to our SMPs, because Samba worked fine with test files at bitrates of >60 Mbps (and because Samba offers additional flexibility that I am making use of to merge shares). Some people on the forum have reported that SMB had throughput issues while NFS did not. It also seems to me that most people having throughput issues are using NAS devices, which obviously have much less processing power than my Linux server. I would suggest that you try SMB sharing with your highest bitrate files, and if it doesn’t work smoothly, then try NFS.
I’m not sure if it’s a fluke or not but my one SMP played the 120Mbps jellyfish video no problem a couple times then stuttered a bit after repeated attempts in places. Internet wise I get about 120Mbps down. I’ve run into cool scenarios where I’ve restarted my NAS on accident (I know right) and h.264 encodes will still play on the TV and never get interupted during the process. My Roku 3’s for example when on wireless lose the settings willy nilly and the hardware and software are hardly put through the paces like the WD.
I’m not sure if it’s a fluke or not but my one SMP played the 120Mbps jellyfish video no problem a couple times
I don’t see how that’d be possible. The SMP has only 100 Mbps network interface.
Yes, I know. I don’t get it either because it happened twice then stopped. I usually run the tests by adding them to my media library (WDTV SMP) and the same via XBMC when I want to check on things. It worked as expected after that and I could repeat it. I wasn’t on anything or inebriated hehe.
I said earlier I’ve run into oddities (buffering) like restarting my NAS while a file is streaming or at least should be and it causes no interuption at all on the WDTV. Pretty sure the file the last time it happened was spongebob which I have in h.264 mp4 container sitting at around 90-150MB in size per epi. I wired my house with GigE this year as wireless worked great on all the devices even while both were in use but it’s increasingly clogged. Five children with the three oldest now starting to get into cellphones with tablets plus my **bleep** plus my wife it’s getting busy. I ended up running two subnets instead so keep things private and secure.
120Mbps over 10/100 won’t happen which is why I mentioned it as the device seems to buffer things quite well as long as you can feed it. Anyways after the first two tries it started to stutter slightly then play fine.
I’m talking about playback that stutters from USB! I first read about this when someone claimed Avatar would stutter for them which I just could not confirm. As it turned out he was talking about the RC1 version which has ~50 MB/s and I about the RC2 version which has ~25 MB/s. So I downloaded some bird videos in several bitrates (can’t find the link anymore) and realized that playback started to stutter at ~50 MB/s on my SMP. Do you experience anything similar when you try these files on your machines?
I’d rather say the player needs a faster CPU/DSP since USB’s nominal 480 Mb/s has plenty of room, even counting overhead which might become problematic on 100 Mbit/s Ethernet.
Agree, I just forgot to say this. Bottom line: Anything around today that makes a WD media player faster tomorrow ought to be included in next top-end models.
I’m just bitter about the lack of gigabit support on this and other devices. Gigabit > usb2.0.
Processor < USB 2.0, so gig wouldn’t do a thing to improve it.
Tony I realize that I’m just miffed that all the devices in general including the wdtv smp don’t support it. I might just have to goto x86 at some point to get it and be happy with the performance but that has it’s own cons with the biggest being power consumption. I might be just impatient as I started hooking up my computers via s-video to my tv’s in the late 90’s and early 00’s. I really miss that ati aiw card.