New user question..

I'm sure this topic has come up over and over again.. I came across this product and site during my attempt to create a hard disk backup of all my kids blu-rays and dvds.. the kids are 6 and 9, and are regularly handling their own DVDs, and invariably, DVDs start dropping like flies.. so I decided to rip our discs to a hard drive backup in the event the originals are destroyed..

As I was doing that, I stumbled across the DLNA technology and serviio! What an awesome possibility, as I do have a wifi sony blu-ray, and am in the market for a new "main" television, and the panasonic set I'm going to pick up has wifi too.. so I set up the serviio trial last night, and connected the player to it with no problem.. I had what seemed like a conflict with the setup for the app on my droid phone where I had to put in an IP address which didn't let the files go to the player, but once I kept the IP spot below the server settings generic and blank, the disc player worked fine..

Connected up and tried to play a higher resolution video in .mp4.. and it stuttered. I turned on the transcoding and set it to optimal (though i'm not sure if that would have anything to do with my issue) and no change.. it just has consistent hesitation in playback. This was a regular movie with I'm sure higher bitrate settings and resolution and all that..

I tried youtube videos on the blu-ray and they work fine, and my kids cartoon movies which are burned at lower resolution work fine..

The computer I'm running serviio on is a relatively new toshiba laptop running windows 7, and the movies are housed on a toshiba 3tb external drive running through usb 3.0 port. I also tried to run a .vob folder, higher resolution movie and still had the choppiness. Is this my computer not being able to transfer the data quick enough leading to the choppy play?

I saw some talk of what sounded like buffering on the PC or something like that, but I couldn't find consistent discussion on my particular topic. Is that some type of buffering on the computer that gets ahead of the transfer to make the playback at the player and tv smoother? I'd absolutely love to be able to play off of the hard drive without necessarily copying the .mp4 files to a thumb drive whenever we want movies, and figured I'd ask if there might be something I'm not considering before I start converting all the stuff to a lower resolution for watching through serviio, retaining higher resolution copies of things we might want..

Any thoughts? Thanks a lot in advance.. What a cool program and capability to have!

In the meantime, my router is a newer netgear wireless unit, so I can't imagine it is the router speed if that question might come up.. Look forward to any thoughts and advice!

Ben

[WildRushSykes]

Are you streaming via wireless or ethernet as if you are running wirelessly it may be the cause of your issues as the stream maybe to high for your wireless card to handle. This sounds like it could be the issue as you stated that lower resolution files are playing stutter free aswell as youtube videos as they are normally much lower bitrate versus blurays.

I am wireless from computer to router, and router to player I was trying.. PC upstairs, router downstairs, player upstairs.. ha.

Don't know if that has anything to do with it, but I am still messing with it today, and have relocated the router upstairs too, so we'll see how it goes in a bit.

[atc98092]

With my Panasonic ST30 TV, hi def video was choppy over Wi-Fi. However, after I changed to a cable it was fine. Even running .11N wireless a few feet from the TV it wasn't enough. With my gigabit wired network (although none of the streaming boxes are Gbit) I have streamed ripped full resolution blu-rays with no issues (over 50Mbps stream).

Also, your PC running Serviio might be a bottleneck if transcoding is enabled and your hardware isn't enough. My first server was a dual core AMD with 4 gig of ram, and it played well but was choking with my highest quality videos. I rebuilt the server with a quad core and 8 gig of ram and it streams everything perfectly.

Thanks for the insight.. I should have put up the specs on the computer I'm using. It is a Toshiba laptop running Intel Core i7, presently with 6gb of ram I believe. I looked it up and it looks like it is a quad core processor.

The high resolution stuff plays perfectly on the computer, and on the television when I hooked the computer up via HDMI. In playing around with it more, I brought the router to the room where the computer and blu-ray player are, and no noticeable improvement.. then hooked the hard drive up to the router directly, and tried to play on the computer, and it was choppy again.. so I figure that confirms it is my wifi speed and I guess I just have to scale back the resolution for streaming stuff via wifi. The only other thing I was playing with but couldn't figure out for sure is whether my router allows me to prioritize the use of the wifi bandwidth in the house. I see you can definitely prioritize, but it seemed like the settings I have access to in the router were pertaining to prioritizing the bandwidth for internet traffic.. would those same priority settings work for internal data flying around the system? I'm curious if I could adjust that and have it make a difference.

The other thing I was looking at is that I have a netgear dual layer router.. with 2.4ghz and 5.0ghz "channels". I am wondering if I have only the media server computer and devices playing movies on one channel, and everything else in the house on the other "channel" if that would free up more bandwidth. Curious if anyone has any thoughts.. Now, my other problem is that my laptop where the serviio software is installed is only showing the 2.4ghz channel for some reason, how, though they were both there before. If I can figure out how to have both show again so I can move different devices around, I'll play with that next. Anyone know why the 5g channel would no longer show? And how to get it back as a connection option?

[atc98092]

Thanks for the specs. Very similar to the laptop I'm using right now.

Based on those specs, still feel it's the Wi-Fi that's holding you back.

I am also a relatively new user. I have been experimenting with wireless and have found a solution that appears to work to stream hulu and cbs via serviio. MP3 music from a hard disk attached to my main router also streams well wirelessly, although serviiio is not involved in that transfer.

I use an Asus RTN56U as my main router. 2.4GHz is used for mainstream wireless and 5GHz is reserved for media. The Asus connects at 5GHz to a netgear WNDR3400 V1 that I loaded with DD-WRT firmware. DD-WRT allows me to turn a refurbished cheap router into an effective wireless bridge. You can purchase dedicated bridges, but they cost more. The media players, primarily a Sony Blu-Ray dvd player with DLNA, are wired to the WNDR3400. Netgear routers natively have a bridge mode, but they basically have no security in that mode. Asus also allows a bridge mode natively with a like Asus router with WPA2/AES security. The wndr3400 with DD-WRT provides WPA2/AES on my client bridge.

I have been experimenting with a very old laptop with Wireless G. I put Windows 8 pro on it as a Win8 laboratory (very good O/S, wretched tiles I bypassed with an open source start menu) It's power is close to a modern Atom processor. I can stream hulu and cbs wireless from it to the asus rtn56u and into the wndr3400 quite nicely. The cpu stays well under 25% I got wake-on-lan working on it and plan to later experiment with it as a serviio server, although that will be as a wired connection to the rtn56u since wireless wake-on-lan does not appear to exist.

Wireless uses a collision detection and avoidance method similar to old style hubs. Traffic has the potential to slow down significantly on a busy wireless. If you want to stream a lot of media, I would investigate the new AC routers, perhaps buy a pair of Asus AC level routers and bridge them together at 5GHz. This will probably support several media streams without a lot of delay. That being said, this is still new technology and very expensive and breaking up yours like I broke up mine with cheap stuff might be a successful alternative. I suppose you could also experiment with adding subnets, although I've never tried to have more than 1 subnet on a home network and don't know exactly how to do it. Youtube could probably show how, I suppose.

Wireless can basically only send or receive per radio, one signal at a time. The streams may join up on multiple radios for additional throughput. Thus, on 2.4GHz wireless at worst case you are sending or receiving. Not both simultaneously. On a busy wireless, each radio might be busy with more than your stream. This might explain choppy performance. You would never notice this surfing the internet. Plus internet video usually buffers some of the signal to compensate for the choppiness. The trick is to break up the signal to more than one radio (both 2.4GHz AND 5GHz, plus get some gigabit wired in the mix, and at least a dedicated 100Mbit at the player end.)

Not all routers can support DD-WRT. If you go that route, I would look for a refurb Netgear WNDR3400v1, WNDR3700V2, or a WNDR4000. Some linksys models also are said to work well with DD-WRT. Instructions on how to load and configure are available on the internet with a little effort. One of the nice things about this configuration is that all of the settings go into the DD-WRT bridge. You do not have to change anything in the main router. If you set up the bridge properly, it works without touching the main router.

Re your existing netgear router, not all unPnP is good at DLNA. I was basically lucky to find my RTN56U. You should also do a little research to ensure that the existing router is not a part of the problem. At this time, Asus is changing firmware and the performance & reliability are sketchy on the new stuff. I'm using older firmware and am afraid to upgrade at this time.

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