No audio when playing .avi files over Windows Network Shares

I wonder if a lot of people with Netgear routers are reporting issues. I had an N600 and returned it in favor of an N900 in hopes the extra bandwidth would resolve the problems. It didn’t.

volumnus wrote:
A  lot of the posters here with a ton of posts actually work for WD.

[citation needed]

volumnus wrote:
It’s a conflict of interest for them to admit the device is flawed.

Don’t judge people by your own standards when it’s so easy to disprove you by reading my posts here on this forum. I’ve gone on the record as being annoyed with the constant flow of new bugs in firmware updates as well as that Marketing apparently is calling the shots, adding features rather than fixing bugs. Does that sound like someone unwilling to admit anything? Does that endear me to WD? Probably not. But it helps making the device better which is ALL I’m interested in.

I also have a Netgear router WNR3500L (and a Netgear Repeater), both with original firmware.

I don’t know if this is helpful, but I thought I’d share. I got my SMP last night. plugged it in, tried it out with a few files. worked great–totally stoked. Went ahead and updated the firmware and it crippled it. At least that’s what I thought, but I think I was wrong. While the SMP was updating it’s firmware (post download), I went into my router (Netgear N300) to poke around and changed the wifi max speed from 150Mbps to 300Mbps on the wirleless settings page. I was hopeful in thinking maybe I could squeeze a little more bandwith to make up for the 1-2 bar signal I’m getting in my bedroom. Anyway, after the firmware upgrade and that one change to my router I noticed issues right away. AVI’s would hardly load, no sound, choppy. What once worked just a few minutes before, now did not. Still skeptical, but willing to try anything I logged back into the router and changed the max speed back down to 150. The SMP now played the same files like it had pre-upgrade.

Anyway, I thought I would share in the hopes that maybe either A. it helps someone having the same issue, or preferrably B. WD can take a closer look at this.

I dialed my router back from max 300 mbps to max 130mbps, and it greatly reduced the audio issue discussed in this thread. It seems like a problem with flow control. The SMP doesn’t work well with gigabit switches either. It prefers the older, slower 10/100 switches. Maybe a firmware revision can alleviate this. Fingers crossed. Bascially the little WDTV box seems to get flooded and chokes.

yeah, i’m really on the fence as to what to do. wired connection is simply not an option. it’s physically impossible due to the layout of my bedroom. i do have a network jack in the room, but it’s behind the bed. that can’t change.

i’m considering

-waiting for WD to take a look and address via firmware

-replacing my Netgear N300 for a different brand

-buying another N300 today to hook up in the bedroom and use as an access point to boost my signal.

how many bars do you have on the SMP? maybe increasing the signal isn’t going to make a difference?

hope they get it resolved. i can watch xvid/avi’s accross the wifi no problem. i watched an entire movie last night and lost audio once towards the end. hit pause and then play and it synced back up. anything with a higher bitrate or file size like a DVD iso and it chokes.

Billy, I get a good, strong signal. I can watch 1080P .MKV without a blip completely over wifi if…and this is a big if…I use a media server. You should try out the N600 (WNDR 3700 v.2). It’s $99 at  Bestbuy.  It’s dual channel and gigabit. I hook up my laptop to the 5GHZ wifi channel and out of necessity my two WD boxes to the 2.4GHZ  wifi channel. From my laptop, I can stream one movie to my box in the living room and a different movie to my box in the bedroom (if I use a media server) without any issues.

were you able to stream those same higher bitrate files through shares over wireless before the firmware fix?

I was never able to stream 1080P (very well) over network shares, even before the firmware update. However, I used to be able to stream 720P over network shares (perfectly) before the update, but now I can’t even do that. Network shares is almost completely useless for video streaming after the update. I tried rolling back to the old firmware, but it didn’t help. I’m tempted to exchange both boxes and just not do the update. Of course, as soon as I did this, WD would release a firmware fix for all of this.

I get choppy video and only one to two seconds of sound and then the sound goes totally mute at max 300mpbs.

I get intermittent sound  and choppy video at max 130mbps.

I get perfect sound and perfect video at max 54mbps.

Is 54mbps enough to push 1080P .mkv. I will test that and report back.

Can someone who is sufferering from this issue PM me if they’re willing to FTP me an AVI that exhibits this issue?

Every .avi exhibits this issue through network shares via wifi if your router channel is set to max 300mbps. Every single avi. Download any .avi off the internet to test it.  Even techflaws admitted the problem exists when he said over on the avs forum,  "any AVI you play back drops sound after a few seconds! I hadn’t realized this previously cause I’d tested a wireless LIVE-S against a wired PC all along. Thevolumnus is correct"

Tony, you can remedy this somewhat by dialing your router back to 130MBPS, but the audio is still very choppy. If you dial the speed back to 54MBPS, the sound is perfect. However, at 54mbps, higer resolution video files like 1080P .mkv stutter like crazy even over a media server.

My routers don’t have a “130” setting.  That’s a really weird number.   It should be 150, I would think, because that’s how the standard is defined.

My routers all run in “AUTO” mode.  

I’ll see if I can find an AVI, but downloading **bleep** off the internet is treacherous.   I have no idea if the file SHOULD play, because I don’t know how it was made.  

Presumably the files ya’ll are talking about are “Known Good.”

My new netgear router offers these options: max 54, max 130, and max 300. It does not have an auto setting. I have tried dozens of avi’s, and all of them play flawlessly even at 300mbps if I use a media server. However, none of the avi’s have audio for more than a second or two if played through network shares via wifi at max 300mbps.

It has played everything I’ve thrown at it without a hiccup over Network Shares, even 1080P .mkv! These audio issues are a wifi bug.

i stopped into best buy on my way home and picked up a belkin powerline av500 on sale for $99. plugged them in and hooked it up. everything works now flawlessly. i’m a happy camper. my wifi expectations were too high i suppose, especially with higher bitrate BD rips and isos. i will recommend the SMP to friends and family as long as they can wire it up. i’m not saying there isn’t an issue with the firmware and wifi, but there are a lot of variables to place all the blame on the SMP.

tony for what it’s worth, my WNR3500L single-band 2.4GHz doesn’t have an auto setting. it’s “up to 54”, “up to 145” and “up to 300”. dropping down to “up to 145” allowed me to play (with little issue) low bitrate AVI’s, but choked on DVD rips, ISO’s, etc. at first i thought it was a low signal issue, but now i’m not so sure based on volum’s comments.

TonyPh12345 wrote:

Can someone who is sufferering from this issue PM me if they’re willing to FTP me an AVI that exhibits this issue?

You can use any AVI you like (the very same streams play back fine muxed into an MKV container). [Deleted]

I created a DIVX AVI file from an MKV. I’m streaming it from my HUB (wifi) to my SMP (Wifi) with no issues. It’s MPEG4 video and DD 5.1 audio. It’s been going for 10 minutes without a hiccup.

Ok, folks, I’ve done the analysis, and it is a WD bug. 

If you’re propeller-headed, read on.  If not, suffice it to say this is a WD issue without question.

It has nothing to do with WiFi, per se, other than the fact that WiFi is much more prone to fall victim and exhibit its symptoms if you have a dodgy or under-performing network.

My testbed:

I streamed FROM a WiFi attached WD TV Live Hub a Test File provided by TechFlaws (thanks!) that demands approximately 1.9 megabits per second (average) of throughput.

General
Complete name : V:\Test\AVI Test File.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 13.6 MiB
Duration : 1mn 0s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 1 901 Kbps
Writing application : VirtualDubMod 1.5.4.1 (build 2178/release)
Writing library : VirtualDubMod build 2178/release

Video
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings, BVOP : 1
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Custom
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 1mn 0s
Bit rate : 1 778 Kbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 544 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.182
Stream size : 12.7 MiB (94%)
Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Mode extension : MS Stereo
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 1mn 0s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 109 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 797 KiB (6%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.60 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 148 ms
Writing library : LAME3.98.2

The file was streamed TO a WiFi-attached WDTV Live SMP.

I streamed the file repeatedly through both Media Server (DLNA) and Network Share (Samba) 

It played for over 15 minutes (on repeat mode with Samba, manual restarts with DLNA) with no loss of audio, no sync issues, no stuttering … no issues at all.

I switched from WIFI source and destination to WIRED source and destination (since it’s much easier to capture the data) and repeated the test.  I dug into a network trace to see why other people are having problems, and the issue jumped right out.

Highlighted in RED are the WD’s *READ* requests from the NAS, and the NAS’s responses.

Note the lines that read:

Read AndX Request, FID xxxxx, 8 bytes at offset …

The WD is asking for ONLY 8 bytes at a time.  Every now and then a larger packet will be requested (maybe 2K or so) but these are EXTRAORDINARILY small packets.

That means the overhead is HUGE.

A “normal” read request will be on the order of 60K bytes or so.   

This is HORRIBLE on a WiFi network, particularly Mixed-Mode networks.   The Live HUB is connected to a dedicated 5 GHz N network.  No mixed mode.   The SMP is connected to a G/N network.  No B clients.

High-performance WLAN will be OK.  Wired will be OK in the majority of cases.

But it also puts a tremendous load on the SERVER.   My QNAP handles this with no issues, but some lower-end PCs or file servers will struggle to process that much network overhead without dropping packets.

… and if packets are dropped, TCP/IP (the lower-order network protocol in use here) quickly collapses due to the small packets.

So this answers the question of why ya’ll changing your “Max Transmit” rate actually improves the issue:  It limits mixed-mode connectivity, and lowers the likelihood of dropped packets.

As to why this only affects AUDIO:   It doesn’t.   It affects the whole stream.   Audio is just the first to go, because of synchronization, it will quickly go out of sync of a packet is lost and is waiting to re-establish sync.  But if the problem is bad enough, the whole playback will break down.

So there ya go.

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And now we wait for new firmware. Hopefully WD will fix this soon.