WD Media Player - MKV files

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

Hi,

I have recently put some mkv files onto my external wd harddrive which is connected to my home network, which i play through the wd media player.  They appear in the list of movies and can be selected.  They take a while to load up (the spinning circle comes up).  They then start to play and first the 1st minute they are ok.  After this it starts to stop and start and then the file freezes and wont play.

Any ideas what is wrong?

2

When you say connected do you mean wired or wireless? If these are MKVs of Blue-Ray rips, forget trying to stream them wirelessly, too much data. What program did you use to make this MKVs? A little more info on your setup would be helpful.

3

Probably this issue:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming-Issue/MKVs-stuttering-due-to-network-exhaustion/idi-p/312872

Please VOTE for it.

1 Like
4

@TonyPh12345, first off thanks for you willingness and technical apptitude to figure this out. A really interesting read that I had not seen till you linked to above.

How did you figure out that the WD was requesting the same data again to fill the buffer as opossed to new data?

Thanks for your hard work

-P

5

I watched it using Wireshark…  

It jumped right out at me…   It’d be at something like Byte# 11,000,000 in the file, and then would jump backward to Byte# 1,000,000 and keep going forward again to 12,000,000, then jump back to 2,000,000…

Not those nice round numbers, but basically just as bad… 

Here’s a visual example.   The Red Arrow points to the packet with the “Jump Back…”

6

Truly amazing, and not to kiss your a$$ too much but we are very lucky to have someone like yourself looking at this stuff for the community. I have come to expect anything and everything from WD and this device, and the pros have so far outweighed the cons enormously, so even with issues like this I simply love the HUB and its capabilities. I have already forgotten what it was like to be flipping CDs/DVDs.

Since you do not see this when you are streaming to a computer can we assume that it is not an issue with the standard video codec but something in the WD application layer code that is requesting the same packets over and over again, even though it already has them in the buffer? Incredible that WD would not see this in their own beta testing, but again, nothing is shocking with these devices or WD’s R&D team and priorities.

Thanks again for the research, and you have motivated me to investigate what is going on over my own home network. Yesterday I did a bunch of read/write testing based on the threads on speed complaints to start tracking a baseline. Today, after reading your above post I have just installed Wireshark and am ready to start playing around with it, (like I need more projects in my life, especially ones like this since network analysis doesn’t get you that far in fine wine sales)  :smileyvery-happy:

Thanks again for all you work

 -P

7

Aww, shucks.  :flushed:  Thanks for the kind words.

It’s really no big deal;  I’ve been doing network decodes since this the day when “Sniffers” cost $20,000.

Now much better software is completely free.  :)

It’s most likely an issue with the “Buffering” algorithm the video decoder uses.   But I really have no idea since I don’t know how the WD is operating internally.   But I can tell you that it didn’t do this on the HUB before, now it is… so it’s a change WD made that affected something else. 

I’m sure they’ll find it and hopefully fix it…

8

Hi.

It is a wired connection on cat6e cables to the bt homehub 3.  AVI’s at 3gb seem to run fine, but for some reason the mkv files seem to just stutter and stop.

9

TonyPh12345 wrote:

I’m sure they’ll find it and hopefully fix it…

 

You have way more faith in WD than I do. If they do fix it they’ll probably end up breaking something else.:manlol: