I have read thru a lot of the buffering issues posts, but have not found one indicating a buffering issue using the local WD Live disk drive.
Here is my situation…
I have been using the WD Live device for a number of years and never experienced a buffering issue until recently. All of my files are located on a central media server (windows 7 pro) using windows shares. This device plays just about anything you can throw at it. And I am using a wired connection only…never wireless.
So what has changed??? Well to start with I purchased a new Marantz receiver (SR-7008) with TRUHD sound capabilities. So I decided to rip my Star Tech (Into the Darkness) Blu Ray disc to my media server and give it a try. About 3/4 of the way thru the movie, it started buffering. And continued to buffer thru the rest of the movie every couple of minutes. Pretty frickin’ annoying.
So I decided to copy the file to the local drive of the WD LIVE player and try that. I figured that move would at least take the network and the media server out of the equation. But playing the movie from the WWDLIVE local drive experienced buffering issues too. I didn’t expect that at all.
So unless someone can shed some light on this issue, I will have to assume that the WD LIVE TV device cannot handle full blown copies of Blu Ray disks…period.
So unless someone can shed some light on this issue, I will have to assume that the WD LIVE TV device cannot handle full blown copies of Blu Ray disks…period.
While I don’t know how much light I can shed, I can tell you that in most cases, the WD has no problems at all playing full BD rips.
I’ve got close to 50 BDs riipped to my library now ranging in size from 25GB to 42GB… They all play back fine over the (wired) network. Including Star Trek: Into Darkness.
If your WD is having issues playing them back even on a local drive, I would think either there might be a hardware issue, or something else going on.
I have, ah, well, let’s just say quite a few Bluray discs ripped to MKV files. I stream them from a Samba server over Ethernet to two SMPs. Never had any problems with any of them playing (via Ethernet).
I also have Into Darkness ripped but have not watched it yet. Mediainfo says the video track has a max bitrate of 31.7Mbps and the overall file average bitrate is 31.8Mbps. This is not particularly high. E.g., Airplane’s video track is max 39.0Mbps, overall average of 42.3Mbps. I recently watched it completely, and it played just fine.
So it seems like something indeed might be wrong with the rip that doesn’t play.
Does the buffering start at the same point in the movie every time?
If you make a note of what time in the movie the buffering starts and then STOP playback, then restart playback using the time search GO TO function to search for a time frame say 5 minutes before the buffering starts, will the movie have buffeing issues at the same point in the movie.
If it does that would indicate a problem with the rip.
Is there strange activity happening on the Media server, such as high disk activity or other indications of a possible hard disk problem? Maybe the area where the Star Trek rip resides is developing a problem and it is taking the hard disk extra time to read the data from the platters.
Is there strange activity happening on the Media server, such as high disk activity or other indications of a possible hard disk problem? Maybe the area where the Star Trek rip resides is developing a problem and it is taking the hard disk extra time to read the data from the platters.
This is an excellent point, but instead of a disk problem it could definitely just be fragmentation of the file. Any time you have problems streaming from a Windows filesystem, the very first thing you should try is defragging the filesystem! Despite NTFS being billed as “new technology,” it remains highly vulnerable to fragmentation. This could definitely be the cause of what you are seeing. I tend to forget about this because fragmentation is virtually never a problem with Linux filesystems. On Windows, though, I have even had DVD burns of big video files fail due to fragmentation. Definitely worth a try.
