Video media freezing within a minute of playback. Network capability?

Hey Guys,

At the moment i’m trying to keep it simple. So I have a Windows PC running plex, plex picks up the Movie files on my harddrives, and the WD TV Live can see the Plex Media Server on the TV, and looks through the plex folders for the movie files. However my movie files are quite large (10GB+). My fear is that the media centre can’t stream as fast as it needs to have fluid playback. Is there a setting in the WD TV Live to limit the bitrate, stream at the lower resolution, etc? Or is there another work around.

This setup works great for TV Episodes, (only 30 minutes, a much smaller res/file size), so that’s why i’m jumping to this conclusion.

I know plex has this, but the options are through plex server themselves (actually playing a file through the plex system), doing it this way I just think it sees and grabs the files but doesn’t take the settings in to consideration.

Thanks in advance guys.

I had a similar problem, albeit with a very different set-up. I found that a small proportion of my media files (predominately high bit rate and >10GB) would constantly freeze and the spinning arrow would appear until the WDTV device had bufferred enough content again. My media library was sitting on a Netgear ReadyNAS connected to a gigabit network.

After much research troubleshooting this peculiar issue (as it only affected <5% of my media collection), I discovered two things.

1/ The WDTV Live streaming unit is a 100MB/sec device. This still shoudn’t be a restriction!

2/ The Media Library view uses the SMB/CIFS file protocol. This protocol is not an efficient protocol and has some significant bandwidth issues. One of the contributors on this forum did some excellent research on bandwidth for different filesystem protocols which showed the SMB protocol performed much worse than NFS. NFS had 2-3 times the throughput.

So I enabled an NFS filesystem on the Netgear ReadyNAS device. So now, for large media files, I select “Content Source - Network Share - Linux Shares” and it works like a charm. All my freezing issues disappeared.

Perhaps you could install an NFS share on your Windows PC and see if this overcomes your issue.

Cheers!

PS. I forgot to mention that you need to go into the Device Settings menu to enable the Linux Share (NFS) Support. It wont appear by default.