Serviio

Hello,

I am running Serviio on a Raspberry Pi, viewing on a Samsung H Series TV and have the files located on an Apple Time Capsule (mounted into the pi's filesystem). I am having problems with frequent buffering and am wondering whether anyone can help to resolve this? I also have miniDLNA setup on the pi and the same video files play fine through this server. Monitoring the CPU and memory usage it doesn't appear that anything is getting overburdened with the task (I have tried overlocking the pi to 1Ghz which doesn't seem to have alleviated the problem in any way). Furthermore, there are no errors in the log files.

I'd really like to get Serviio working well as its features are far more desirable. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

What version of Serviio are you running? Version 1.5 included some changes to do with how data is transferred, that were applied to the H series profile.o

Sorry, I missed that in my late night post. Currently using 1.5 (previously 1.4.2, but the problem exists in both versions).

Furthermore everything is on a wired network. I have also copied an mkv file to a local USB pen drive connected to the pi and still experienced some buffering. Read speed from the Pi to the Time Machine is at around 9--10 MB/s. Serviio's java process takes between 5 and 30 % of the CPU and around 22% of the pi's memory. There is more than 300MB of free RAM while streaming. Nothing seems to be spiking on the Pi when the buffering occurs.

Buffering occurs every 30 seconds or so, depending upon the bitrate of the film (but at times films will run for a couple/few minutes without buffering). I can stream the films directly from the time machine to my laptop using VLC without any problems.

Does the data pass directly from the source to the TV or does it pass through the Serviio process on the pi?

Yes, the data does pass through Serviio, and does not go directly from the source. The Samsung H series profile does not transcode MKV files, unless there's something bizarre with your video. I'm not where I can look at the exact profile right now, but all my MKV files play native. They cover MPEG2, H.264, AVC and VC-1 video codecs.

Can you see if FFMPEG is running while you are streaming the video? This would tell if it's being transcoded, and I have doubts the Pi has the power for it.

The only time that I have seen FFMPEG running is when serviio is indexing the films. When streaming it's not running (well if it is, it certainly isn't taking up enough CPU to be visible on the 'top' list.)