I have 2 WDTV Units, 1 is an older unit and the other is a WDTV Live.
Both units were working fine until a week ago.
now they both studder when playing back files, the only thing that i have changed is adding a gigabit switch to my TV upstairs, and a power bar.
The TV Downstairs is hard wired into my router, the TV upstairs is ehternet connection to a DLink power line connection, which worked fine.
I have tried many different solutions.
Rebooting everything, Main PC, Switch, WD Boxes, Router.
Downgrading FW on WDTV Live unit.
Unhooking switch and directly hooking into the WDTV Live unti (the way it was prior to this)
Nothing seems to work.
I do not know where to turn anymore, and the internet seems to be usless for my situation.
Im starting to think that maybe the HD that my movies are located on might be on the fritz?
Any help is appriciated.
Thanks
You don’t describe the stuttering in any detail. Are movies constantly “jerky” or do they play for a while then rebuffer (circling-arrow)? Same effect with all movies? Do you have some with high bitrate and some with low so you can try and see if there are any differences?
Also, how are the movies being served to the SMPs? Windows shares, DNLA server?
General tips when a Windows machine is having trouble serving video fast enough is to defrag the drive, make sure you don’t have all sorts of unwanted autostart programs running, and make sure the machine isn’t infected with malware.
Does not sound like a failing drive. Then you would get errors reading certain files and the streaming would stop.
Hi there, sorry for the late response and the lack of info in my origonal message.
I am sharing over a Network Share.
The studdering And Quiting now happens on all files.
the studdering never shows the orange circle, but just studders ( sorry for lack of detail, im not sure how else to describe it) and now it boots me right out of the movie back to the menu. (this is new)
I have rolled my pc back to windows 8 from 8.1. I am in the process of clearing out the Hard drives to see if this works.
Please let me know what other information you would like.
Thanks for the help, much appriciated.
Shane
i had this problem with my drobo, id there always seems to be an issuise when going from gigabit to the 100mbs ports on the WDTV’s id recommend buying a cheapy 100mbs switch and plugging all your WDTV’s as well as whatever your using as a storage unit. weather it be a pc, drobo, or another NAS device. everything seems to work better when its connected to the same 100mbs switch. thats jsut from my personal experience. you can get a 5port switch for $10
I have never had any issues with the SMPs using 100Mbps connections and the file server and the rest of my network using 1000Mbps (GigE). There is a potential issue if your server’s GigE NIC is set to use “jumbo frames” (MTU>1500B). Mine is not. Because it could cause compatilibity problems–and is quite unlikely to improve network performance–I doubt most NAS’s would be configured for jumbo frames by default, nor would OS (drivers).
The SMP mounts Windows shares and reads the files “block by block.” I.e., the files are not streamed at it under the control of the server only. So it is not like the server is going to be blasting the entire file at gigabit speeds at some poor switch that can pass them on at only 100Mbps speeds. All switches have to have some buffering capability, that should deal with the speed mismatch for the blocks that are being sent/read. You can certainly check NIC statistics on your server to see if packets are being dropped and having to be retransmitted. My server shows virtually zero.
ncarver is dead on target there.
Lots of the inexpensive switches, though, have very small packet buffers (like 8Kbtes) and your NAS may be sending traffic 64Kbytes at a time. This will overrun the switch’s buffers and cause packet loss.
Update
I had some M4V Files on my ard drive.
After Reverting back to windows 8. Cleaning out my hard drive and getting rid of those m4V files. The system seems to be working properly again. I will look into that switch solution as well, the only thing is that when i disconnected the switch and went straight into the wd box, i had the same problem
I have noticed in the past that the wd boxes dont like certian files. and until there removed you get a couple issues.
