Is the network transfer speed issue been resolved?

I purchased a WDTV Live Hub online last week and recieved it today.  Ive been reading a lot of negative feedback regarding the network transfer speed.  Has this issue been resolved?  Ive had a WDTVLive Plus for about 4 months and use an external hdd to transfer stuff to.    Transfer speed has been a bit slow on that device also, but I contributed it to the fact it was an external hard drive over USB.  The WDTV Live Hub has an internal harddrive, seems like the speed should be no issue.

I get  10 to 12 MB’s/sec transfer rate over the network.

WiFi or ethernet?

I just switched to a gigabit switch, all devices connected at 1000mbps, saw zero improvement.  This was also noted in a review at Anandtech.

To the best of my knowledge no one has ever gotten better than 100mbps performance out of one of these (remember its megabits not bytes so divide by 8 and you get 12mbps)

With my laptop wired to a router, I get 10mbps. If I go wireless, I get around 7.3mbps. I have never tried setting up static address and test, but my guess is I would get the same results.

You would guess correctly.

I have 1G wired straight to the WD Live Hub. With the little box doing nothing else, max writes to it I see are about 13M/s and that’s off a 4xRaptor volume but same thing off my NAS too which is obviously slower than the RAID but a **bleep** of a lot faster (60M/s+) than the WD hub appears capable of.

It’s simply pathetic. Extra annoying since it touting a 1G NIC was in the top 3 reasons I purchased it. It fails to come anywhere close to reasonable expected speeds and the only responses i see on the subject so far are either “Also annoyed about it” or “It can’t go any faster due to **bleep** hardware”.

Also from what I’ve read in their FAQ links, if you have high bit rate movies (you know, actual HD high quality bit rates) another limiting factor is Samba can’t do it so they suggest using an external media server instead that is capable of it.

The box was advertized as a 1-stop shop high performant part for todays demanding media streaming needs. It’s not. It’s a slow clunker that provides a lot of online services (when they actually work and the box doesn’t reboot or freeze).

Still haven’t found an alternative that supports as many (or enough) formats so I haven’t thrown it into the firepit yet. What I’ll probably wind up doing in the mean time is creating a dedicated 4ghz single processor Virtual Machine on my 12core monster and turn the little box into a passthrough. But I’m sure I’ll just run into yet another selection of horrendous hardware limitations on the little box preventing true HD no matter what. Just annoying.

Edited:

Went ahead and enabled my NAS ReadyDLNA and will test high bit rates when get the time.

I am a bit confused on the network speed issue so hoping you can clarify this for me. I am running blue-ray video in MKV containers from an external drive attached to a WDLivePlus across my network to my WDLiveHUB in another room. I have not experienced any difficulty at all so far in doing so (and yes I know others have had stuttering problems). All of the the machines on the network are hardwired with ethernet cables.

 

When I check my network from my laptop to the LivePlus using CNET’s LanSpeed I am seeing read speeds of 6.4998 Megabytes/sec or 51.9982 Megabits/Sec. Admitedly slow as mollases but am I incorrect in thinking that speed is more than sufficient for streaming hi-def video across my network? I am under the impression that blue-ray can spike up to 36 Megabits/Sec, so I still have plenty of clearance room to successfuly get the video streamed. And then of course my network has tons of bandwidth still available to do other tasks on between other computers. BTW, my access to the LivePlus and the LiveHub are very similar in both read and write speeds.

 

Note: I know almost nothing about video encoding or how stuff is passed on a network, I just have empirical evidence that I am able to steam hi-def movies from one WD box to another WD box.

 

So why is there an issue with streaming video? In most posts here on read speed and network access people are claiming to get between 6-12 Megabytes/sec which would seem to be enough to work just fine.

 

Now, that certainly doesn’t answer for how slow it is to copy files to the HUB and that WD is clearly lacking on speed access to the hard drive, but thats a whole different issue. As long as I can stream video and audio, I am OK with how long it takes to copy something.

 

Sorry if I am missunderstanding something here, as I am just starting to play around with the HUB and my knowledge of technology is pretty limited.

 

Thanks

 

-P

 

IronSpine wrote:
   

 

The box was advertized as a 1-stop shop high performant part for todays demanding media streaming needs. It’s not. It’s a slow clunker that provides a lot of online services (when they actually work and the box doesn’t reboot or freeze).

 

After doing some more research on the subject of slow network speed, The Realtek RTL8110SC(L) LOM Gigabit Ethernet controller installed in the hub is fully capable of gigabyte speed according to this link. " http://www.realtek.com/products/productsView.aspx?Langid=1&PFid=4&Level=5&Conn=4&ProdID=9 I have to guess again that maybe the underlying problem with the slow transfer speed might be caused by an outdated or badly configured device driver used in the FW. I noticed that Realtek as been updating the drivers for all Operating system. Might be a good time for the coders to have a closer look at this issue and verify if they are in fact using the latest device driver and that it is configured properly. And maybe they could update the Twonky interface as well since there is a newer version available.

@pearl

2 different issues yes. One relates to the ability of the WD to reach (or in this case, not reach) decent speeds expected when a gigabit connection exists in relation to raw transfer of (not playing of) data.

The other is bitrate (assuming raw transfer available can exceed this and in good wired network conditions it usually will, very easily). This one appears specifically (according to WD own faq) an issue with Samba not able to do high bitrate content. At the moment I assume the box hits a performance ceiling and starts choking but that’s a guess.

This one is also more annoying to compare configurations when testing because the length of time generally, but that’s just because I haven’t specifically made a batch of varying bitrate shorts for testing. I may actually do that in a few and see results.

But for example since I read Samba is not good at it I’ve kicked on my ReadyDLNA and will see if a movie I made (T4 @ 8200kbps) with known problems (stuttering / slowdown / speed up / freeze / repeat) that eventually show up goes away when doing it this way versus just letting the box hit the NAS as a network share.

Edited:

Ok I’m at a loss. Using T4 I did a 2min chunk of high action (max scene data changing) at 20245kbps bitrate and it played just fine. I’ll have to dig deeper if I ever get time to do that.

IronSpine, thanks for the clarification (I think). If I understand correctly the differance is the the WDs ability to transfer data versus the ability to stream it at specific upper bit rates (or speed).

From an earlier post on this site, it is my understanding that although NFS would in general be faster, SAMBA has no upper limit of throughput but that it is determined by the client and server implementation of the protocol. So if correct that would assume that WD’s implementation of the server/client over SAMBA is where the problem lies.

So… that being the case, movies that are local to the HUB should not be affected by this at all as their only limitation is the HD and WD’s processor speed/power. And please correct me where I am wrong here (or way off base for that mattter) The SAMBA issue only would effect machines using that connection protocol for file services, like another WDBOX or a Windows machine. A DLNA enabled device would not use SAMBA correcto connect so should get the stream faster?

All I can say is wow. This stuff is way over my head but certainly fascinating. As above, I have not run into any actual issues steaming video between to WD Devices yet, so at the moment this is all academic to me.

On a side note, what is a good way to identify the bit rate of a video so I figure out what bitrates are really working for me? I have been using g-spot video analyser but at least the version I am using does not work with MKV files so I cannot tell what their bitrate is, and most of my other containers (avi, standard vob / iso etc) don’t have bitrates higher than 4600kbps.

Please keep us up to date on what you find out from your latest succcessful test using 20000+kbps video. Assuming that you have that video on your HUB, what deveice are you steaming that to?

Thanks for the information overload. Loving this community, never thought I would care to learn so much about how this @#$% thing works

-P

@pearl

There are plenty of us that are not experts in video processing, technology and a host of other aspects so don’t feel alone. Just because I’'m a developer doesn’t mean I have a huge pool of knowledge on the matter. I do enterprise development. We don’t have much call for fiddling with bits, encoding and transcoding. But I’m with you that it’s interesting and fun to mess with.

As far as decent tools to use to get bitrates I use is this:

Media Info

This is a sourge forge (community / free) project. Works well enough for my purposes.

Note the 20000kbps test file (along with all my content) is sitting on my NAS, not the WD, so all my stuff actually is streamed across the lan. I finally got around to snatching Book of Eli off my disc to a file last night and while watching it at about 50m in I saw the issue, and it’s only 8000kbps video but the audio is 1500kbps. This made me wonder perhaps the audio stream in combintation is the culprit, but I checked my T4 but it’s only 320kbps soo… ? still at a loss.

If Samba is slow they should put an FTP server on the HUB. Just NFS and go straight for the fastest possible protocol.

@IronSpine

Thanks for all the explaining and the link to media info. A very nice and easy to use program.

Looked through some of my MKVs and the highest bitrate one I have found so far is 8700kbps with a 1510kbps audio stream that was originally a blu-ray disc ripped to 1080p. It has always seemed to work great but as it is a concert video I am honestly not sure I have ever watched the entire thing beginning to end. Going to be a while till I have a chance to sit down and actually monitor the entire 1.5 hrs to see if I have issues or not, but will do so and post back here. It will be between two WD devices

TonyPh12345 posted on an interesting issue where the client buffer on the WD requests the same data multiple times with MKVs on FW 3.x. He has tracked the issue down to seeing that for every 11Mbs transferred, 10Mbs of it is duplicate causing 8 to 10 times the expected network traffic.

If I can ever find some free moments in my life I will track the data from the above MKV while watching it, and if I have issues see if that is the cause as opposed to bitrate or SAMBA limitations.

His thread is here if you have not seen it. It’s pretty amazing and a testament to poor beta testing of the application layer clients on WD’s end.

MKVs stuttering due to network exhaustion

As and aside, although I have what I would consider a pretty large movie collection, It is primarily focused on older movies, a majority being B&W and a lot in 4:3 (or close to it) as they were filmed pre 1953. Thus as you can imagine, I have not run into the problems that many people here have with high bitrate blu-ray rips.

Also note that even with every issue I have dealt with in the past year plus with my LivePlus and then LiveHUB, I could not be a bigger fan and advocate of these products in general. For a very inexpensive piece of hardware, it certainly has some really great capabilities and has totally enhanced my ability to view movies, listen to music, and watch my home video and pics. Throw in the few Internet based apps that I actually use and it’s pretty impressive what you get for short cash.

Thanks for the info

-P