Can anyone please help me by explaining the difference between a network share on a DNS-323 NAS device and both Windows Vista and Windows 7 network shares.
I have been testing a WD TV Live media player with Blue Ray rips and when playing the films from a shared folder on any of my windows PCs (all high spec and 1Gb network) the films stutter and stop start. Regular media plays ok, I am talking about 1080p content whith total film sizes of 10-16GB. It is not the speed of the network because I have a small cheap DNS -323 NAS device and if I drop the movie files onto its shared folders they play perfectly and you could also drag movie files across the network to the device whilst playing and the film doesnt glitch at all. I have 4 apple TV boxes and from the same pcs as being used in this test, 4 different films can be streamed simultaneously and network copying with no error (I know apple has a buffer ;-)). Basically the quad core pcs should be better at streaming the 1080p data than the DNS-323 NAS device but they are not, so I am trying to find out what is different at packet level, I think they are both samba. I did manage to get the windows 7 machine streaming by disabling the recieve auto-tune on the TCIP (netsh), but it was fragile; If I did something else on the network with that pc then the stutturing re-occured.
The WD TV Live has a facility whereby you can plug in a USB device directly to it and this device becomes available as a network share, so that content can be copied to it convenienty from the PC that you make the rip or have the media. When copying the data the most I could get was 1.6MB/s which eventually slowed down to 342KB/s; this made it impossible to get any data to the drive in a reasonable time. WD TV Live has a 100Mbit LAN, so I just dont understand why it cant communicate with windows at a decent speed, but can with the DND-323 NAS device. I would prefer to stream from a PC because the data storage can be expanded much easier (2TB USB or even more internals) and cheaper than NAS devices; but even if I decide to buy another NAS device I wont know if it will work until I buy it, unless I understand why WD TV Live will communicate with a linksys DNS - 323 at high speed, but not windows pcs :-(.
I read about SMB and NFS, but didnt really understand and it seems that Vista cant do NFS etc… I think that the DNS 323 is samba.
I do have Windows 7, and there are issues with network sharing between the Live and W7. My suggestion would be read up on those threads, here or on other forums to sort out your issues.
I think you maybe asking to much in comparing a Live to an Apple TV-- while the Live! does a lot media things better, the Apple TV runs an optimized version of OSX… And with Apple’s control of hardware- it’s easy to understand why it may perform better on ‘mundane’ tasks like file sharing.
I, for one, have never had a problem throwing a 0.25DVD avi (1.09GB) to the USB drive connected to the Live. It might take 3 minutes tops. But to transfer large while playing, is too much to ask I think especially for a box that cost $120… Scale back your expectations and use the Live for what it is. You’ll probably be a lot calmer.
Thanks for your reply and I know what you mean by calmer…lol
Unfortunately I am like a “dog with a bone” and cant let go. In fairness I am trying to use it for what it is meant. I stopped using the old version of this product over 1 year ago because it was too much hassle and started using apple TV. The problem is the purchased apple content and even your own rips are not HD, so I dont understand how they claim they are, in fact many aren`t even DVD quality :-(.
** (iTunes Store purchased video: 320 by 240 pixels, 640 by 480 pixels, 720 by 480 pixels (anamorphic), or high-definition 720p)
So WD add a network port to their product and 1080p at full resolution with the intention of streaming videos directly from a source other than USB, im just trying to make it do what it is meant to ;-). It does this perfectly to my Linksys dns 323 NAS device and as it only requires 100Mbit to acheive this I am left with 90% of network capacity for the apple boxes and everything else. If I can find out what is different between the linksys and windows pcs I will have my answer and the perfect solution.
Ok I am 50% complete now with the solution although the question of why is still unanswered.
If I use the free copy of Teracopy to transfer the rips from the PC to the WDTV Live USB drive across the network I get 12MB/Sec. The 100Mbit lan port on WDTV is only capable of 12.5MB/sec, so i can`t grumble about that :-). As a reminder without Teracopy I get 1.6MB/sec max, but usually less.
So now I know for sure that it is the windows language / protocols that don`t work properly with WD TV Live but I have found a solution for transfering at expected speed. I will now find out what Teracopy does or uses to do this and then maybe try and apply a similar solution for the streaming. By tonight I hope to have 1 PC streaming 1080p to a WDTV Live box, also streaming 4 seperate films to 4 X apple boxes and just for the mix I will do a massive file copy to the NAS, just to see if the 1000Mbit (125MB/sec) splits up nicely :-).
Project 100% Complete. From one Vista PC (wired 1GB lan - however as a test I dropped the switch to 100Mbit and everything still functioned fine :-))
I used Teracopy to get files across faster, but I don`t need to anymore because I got the streaming working perfectly at 1080p (16GB file) using Tversity. I am not using it to adjust or interfere with the files, just to share them with the WD TV Live.
I can now stream different films to 4 X apple TV boxes, 1 x 1080p film to WD TV Live and carry out a file massive file copy across the network with no glitches. Sadly I still dont know why :-(. What is is that Tversity does to the file share that windows alone cant?
Im gonna find out now if the iplayer and the other fancy stuff in Tversity works. A bit of a bonus really as I didnt know about dlna servers and the available internet content.
I too would like to get rid of my requirement to Use Network Shares and not Tversity but unfortunately Tversity will always transcode mkv files to the WDTVLive… It also thinks that the it is a DSM750. One nice thing about the network shares is you never have to worry about moving your files to a fold that Tversity is watching and then refreshing it. Oh well the WDTV is being boxed up today and sent back to amazon
In my personal opinion, I think it may be that in order for your computer to stream 1080p video to the WD TV Live, it needs to pull the data from your drive at a high rate of speed so avoid sputters, buffering, etc… If it is a drive on your computer, might you have some other program or software that is accessing the drive?
If that is the case, then it just isn;t able to pull the info off of your drive fast enough to stream it to the TV… You mentioned that you do not have this problem when accessing if off of your NAS drive, which sort of points to this as being the case…
Another possibility could be that your wireless connection of your computer to the network could nto be stong enough and this is is great for inter or streaming non-1080p media, burt 1080 could just be too much for it…
Not sure if this helps but I can transfer large files far faster (on my a DNS-323) when I use something other than Windows as a file manager not sure why, just think Windows slows it down somehow.
I doubt the processor speed has anything to do with it, but rather read / write speed to the disk. May be something to do with the file system, DNS-323 uses ext2 which I believe is a non-journalized file system which therefore can read and write to the drive faster but I’m no Linux guru so you may want to check with someone more qualified.
Please read my posts in more detail. I don`t use wifi and my problems are all sorted. The device is working superbly and I have achhieved multiple reliable streams simulatenously.
In fact 1X1080p stream, 4 X apple TV streams and a large file copy all at the same time. Itunes handles the apple streams and Tversity handles the WD TVLive stream. Teracopy sorts out the copying although I don`t need this functionality anymore.
First off I’m not a network guru by any means however after a bit of reading about what devices might lose connectivity on a network I came up with the notion that I might have the data packet size set too high. The WDTVL is 10/100 and I have a wired Gigabit network. I have no server, just playing video files from a network share folder on component input and the network connection is lost. I have to turn off the WDTVL, turn it back on and restart the video file which usually restarts just about where it left off. Then a few minutes later it disconnects again.
I read up a bit about it and came to the conclusion that it might be the packet size settings for may network adapters. I have since reduced these to 1047 and things are fine.
The reference I read said to enter “ping -f -l 1047 ?.?.?.?” at the command prompt to start with. [The ?.?.?.? is what ever your IP address is on your WDTVL] You can bump up the value of 1047 to see what your PC to WDTCL will handle.
Apparently too, if the packet size is set too high the devices will fragment the packets which uses up more processor resources to process.
I am very new to all this network jargon and it probably has no validity so I’d appreciate notification if I’m barking up the wrong tree.
I think I’d like to throw my two cents in here. I’m hearing several issues here: 1) having to do with file transfer rates, 2) network transfer rates, and I think, issues with Vista and 7 when it comes to accessing files through Samba…
You guys seem to have the network issues worked out. But you do need to know that if you are having problems sharing files from Windows pc’s through the WD TV Live, you need to make sure that all the permissions have been allowed through Windows on Vista and 7. Both of those perceive the WD TV as a network access threat, so you have to tell them to allow the WD TV.
WD should have a knowledge base article for that, just search it under wd tv live.
