Serviio

Running Serviio 1.0.1, WIndows Server 2003 R2 x64, dual core CPU and 8 gig of ram. I have some MKV files that are straight rips from Blu-Ray with HD audio intact. If I try streaming the video from my Windows 7 computer (using the built in DLNA functionality) I can play the movie and the HD audio is shown on my receiver display. If I copy the same file to my Serviio server, the video becomes very choppy as soon as the bit rate exceeds 30Mbps, which Blu-Ray videos do often. Audio is shown as PCM, not the HD stream, and nothing is actually heard from the speakers. DLNA player is a Sony SMP-N200 via wired gigabit network. Transcoding is disabled (won't play at all if I enable it) and using the Sony SMP profile.

Is there any way to limit the video bitrate since I'm not transcoding? I'd love to leave these files in their uncompressed glory, but I need to be able to watch them, and I'd prefer to keep them on my server rather than by workstation, as I have all the hard drive space there. Also, streaming from the Win 7 box to my Panasonic Viera TV is jerky, but I believe that's an issue with the TV accepting such a high bitrate.

Usually DLNA devices support up to 20 MBit bitrates max, so 30MBit will probably cause you troubles.

Thanks, Zip. Kind of what I thought. Is there any method of restricting the bitrate through a profile?

you can transcode with maxVBitrate ... have a look at some of the existing profiles

Here's an interesting development. My motherboard finked out on me so I had to rebuild my server. I now run an AMD Phenom II X4 965 with 8 gig of ram. Still Windows Server 2003 R2 x64, so the only real change is DDR3 memory (vs DDR2) and 4 cores instead of 2.

I can now stream uncompressed Blu-ray rips in either MKV or M2TS format on my Sony SMP-N200. If I rip it correctly, I can select captions and it even streams Dolby TrueHD audio. The Sony won't decode DTS Master Audio, so it comes out straight DTS. My Panasonic ST30 Plasma still chokes on it, but playing on the Sony is now perfect.

It appears that DLNA supports the high bitrate. The Sony lets me view the bitrate in real time, and I've seen almost 30MBps video, plus 1.5MBps DTS audio. Outstanding!