OK, i’m down to two frustrations trying to get my WDTV working correct and I will post them seperately. Any help you more experienced guys with this is very much appreciated.
I just started working wiht my BlueRay discs. Up until now I have converted my entire DVD collection to MKIV’s and they all seem to play fine. After weeks, on only one occasion I had several files freeze. I had to exit from the playback and restart, or simply change chapters, to get them to move again. I had previously played all of those files and had no issues. Everything since seems to work fine. I’m only mentioning it here in case it’s relevant.
So I have converted 3 BR discs to MKV using MakeMKV. They are unaltered, ucomplressed video / audio files from the source, just stripping out foreign language audio and subtitles. So far I’ve only really played around with two of them, but they both have the same issue. They play fine and then start to studder significantly. The only wit it clears up is to stop/start playback, or change chapters. Sometimes them seem to studder in the same places in the file, sometimes it plays over areas where it first studdered but then studders in a different spot.
My setup (everything in this system is 4 months old or newer)
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D-Link Gigabit switches (2 in the systems)
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PLaying from a network drive on a Vista 64 bit machine running as a server only.
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AMD Athalon II 3.0 X2
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4 GB DDR2 1066 RAM
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Hitachi 7200 RPM 2.0 TB drive for storage (OS on a seperate drive).
So far to trouble shoot -
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I have replaced the cables from my swtiches to the player and computer.
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I ran a temp cable between the swtiches to rule out the cable in the wall.
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I copied the file from the current storage drive to two other drives in the same machine to rule out a drive issue (one same type, one completely different). Tried to run it from 3 different drives
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I plugged the main storage drive into a seperate SATA controller card to rule out the on-board controller. (its a card I use for an E-SATA port, but it has an internal port too).
The only thing I can think of is to use the temp cable again and swap the switches to see if one of the two is bad. Seems pretty unlikely though.
Now i’m questioning the file itself, or the WDTV. Does anyone have issues playing a full bitrate uncompressed blue ray disk from a network drive on the WDTV? Can anyone confirm they dont have issues doing this? I think most people are using H264… but not entirely sure. I was wondering if the smaller compressed file plays better?
I see a lot of people use handbrake. I started with MakeMKV for DVD’s. Originally I downloaded AnyDVD before I realized it wasn’t needed for MakeMKV. My problem now is the trial period is gone so I can’t test anything to see it using AnyDVD/Handbrake will solve te problem. I have no problem wiht paying for software that works. I just dont want to pay for it and then find out it was a different problem.
I did just try to play the file in WMP streaming from the same network share (in fact while typing this). It seemed to have some studdering too, but that in iteself doesnt eliminate many problems other than maybe the WDTV itself.
I just started running MKVToolnix on the MKV file to see if it can clear anything up. IT’s pretty slow so we’ll see where that goes in about 45 mintues or so.
Well there is the latest chapter in my saga to get a media server running. Any help or thoughts is really aprpeciated. Thanks to all of you for the help.