[SOLVED] Sony S3100 Blu Ray Player Lagging

Howdy, I'm absolutely loving Serviio, but for some reason man of the higher quality videos I stream from my laptop stutter and chop.

I'm streaming all of this WIRED over my home network.

My Laptop is an ASUS G55VW with a 3rd gen i7 processor, Geforce 660M gfx card, and 12 GB of RAM. Everything is set to high performance and is plugged in, so there isn't any stunting from the resources of my laptop. I have also forced the use of all threads in the console. "Produce best video quality" is selected. Again, using a Sony S3100 to view the media on my TV.

Game of Thrones for instance: When the intro sequence starts to play, the video and audio stutters throughout the whole thing.

Looking at the task manager, generally movies that I have this problem with are being transcoded using ffmpeg (32 Bit), and its resource usage will generally spike during the stutters, but never over 31% or so.
I HAVE installed the k-lite codec pack which claims to have 64-bit codecs. Could the problem be that the 32 bit codec isn't able to draw enough from my system resources?

I did do a search of the forums and web about this, and I didn't find anything that could be a solution. Of course, I'm going to continue to search and see if I can find a viable solution.

[atc98092]

What format are your videos in? The S3100 will play many different formats without transcoding, so I'm curious why it is being transcoded. Regardless of your computer, it's still possible that you are encountering the stutter because it can't keep up. Not likely, but possible. Regardless of the specs, it's still a laptop and there might be a bottleneck somewhere in the I/O. As long as you don't need transcoding, the Serviio computer doesn't need much power.

I have numerous HD Blu-Ray rips that play on my S3100 with no issues. Some even have a bitrate exceeding 50Mbps, which is why I have a gigabit network. My HD files are all either MKV or M2TS. The S3100 plays them without transcoding. What profile have you selected in the Serviio console? Zip added a new one just for the Sx100 series, but it may not have been selected automatically. If you are using the wrong profile, that may be why they are being transcoded. My older SMP-N200 boxes required transcoding for MKV, and you may have the older profile selected.

Thank you for the response. The format for the files are .mkv. I am not sure what the video compression is (most of the time mkv files are only containers). The profile for the Sony sx100 2013 series has been selected. Also, I am not using a gigabit network. The ethernet splitter I am using on my media player is limited to 100 Mbps. I don't see how this would be an issue since, but I'm going to see if I can plug them in directly and see how video performance does.

The performance when directly connect was quite a bit better, but I am still confused as to why this would be a huge issue. Maybe I misunderstand how bitrates and network connections work, but I seriously thought 100mbps would still be enough after doing the math.

Update - So I've fixed the problem, but I need to explain my network setup a little better.

My laptop is connected to a powerline adapter, which connects to the 4th slot of the primary router, and the ethernet switch is connected to another powerline adapter in the same room. The switch is a 5-slot, and limited to 100mbps for the whole box.

The first thing I did was disconnect the ethernet switch, and connect the bluray player to the powerline adapter. Still stuttering.
Second - I connected the laptop's ethernet adapter directly to the bdp ethernet adapter. Not stutteing whatsoever, but no wire internet for either.
Third - I connected both to the ethernet switch (the switch was still disconnected from the powerline adapter), and no stutter. Meaning the 100mbps limit of the switch was not an issue after all.
Fourth - I connected the ethernet switch to the home network via the powerline adapter, less lag than before step 1, but still stuttering.
Fifth - I disconnected one of the media players (the ATT uverse player) from the ethernet, and the stuttering stopped. This allowed internet connection and perfect serving to the bdp.

So the two issues were likely that 1-the powerline adapters were creating a degree of latency between the laptop and the bdp, and 2-the uverse receiver was weighing down the ethernet switch in some way (even though it was turned off).

Thank you for your help!!!!

[atc98092]

I know there's a wide variation in bandwidth with powerline adapters, although I thought most recent ones are at least 100 Mbps. Remember too, even with 100 Mb, your real world bandwidth is more like 80-85. With a HD video pushing or exceeding 50 Mb, there isn't much room for anything else. Maybe the uVerse player was downloading something, even though it was "off".

Glad you have it resolved. The S3100 really does work well as a media player.