Blu-ray disk rips and performance

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

I have a few blue ray disks I would like to have on my server.  Will the WDTV Live Hub (running FW 2.07.17) run these and “keep up” to the resolution needs?  My WD hub already “stutters” occasionally with “normal DVD” playback, so I am concerned it doesn’t have the “guts” to run blu-ray.

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions,

Mike

2

If yours stutters with DVD playback, no chance of playing Bluray.   Bluray requires 4-5x the bandwidth.

The Hub is capable, of course, of doing both, but it sounds like your network may not be up to the task…

3

I can’t imagine a wired Cat 6 network with gigabit switches not being “up to the task”, but the WD design (chipset) probably falls way short of doing it.

4

Wireless? No way.

Wired or local? No problem. My full-rez MKV Blu-ray rips play fine on the hub so long as they are via wired connection or stored on the internal or USB drives.

1 Like
5

Thanks for your performance verification.  I’m on Cat 6 so I think it will be o.k.

I have read “brag articles” recently saying only the newest (link Pivos Aios device) can keep up to the blue-ray demands, but I was suspicious that may not be true.

How and or what do you use for rips on blu-ray disks?  And what brand/model drive will I need for my PC?  I built an ASUS P6T7 with quad core so I am sure it has the horse power, jus need a recommendation on blu-ray drive for it and ripping software.

Thanks,

Mike

6

I’ve used iso and mkv files directly connected to the hub and over my gigabit network (my primary method) with no issues shared off an older (Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz Windows XP) PC.  I’ve never tried wireless.  A friend also uses exclusively uses his gigabit network to play blu-ray isos and mkv’s with no issue. Any problems are likely with slow network, using wireless, or poor rips.

7

I can never play anything over a ‘network’, it is slow as **bleep** and I have 15mbs cable. For Blu-Rays, I ripped to mt2s files and they play fine from the internal 1TB HDD. The quality is 100% HD with 5.1 audio.

8

15 Mb is your internet connection.  Your internal network in this day and age should at least be 100 Mb unless your using wireless.  On my Gb network everything streams fine with no hiccups from my PC to my WDTV.  I haven’t tried the WDTV on a 100 Mb network so I’m unsure of the reults there.

9

Yeah my internet is 15mbps and I thought it was fast. As for the HUB, there is only ethernet connection but for everything it streams from (my laptops) it is as slow as a snail. I don’t even bother using DLNA.

10

My two Hubs will stream DVD iso’s and bluray mkv rips without a problem, between the rwo hubs, and from my My Book Lives (gigabit ethernet).

11

Is there a trick to this or do you guys have super fast internet connections? How do I go about to achieve this result?

12

Again, internet speed is completely irrelevent when you’re watching local content.

You don’t even need to have internet at all to play blurays in your home network.

13

Correct.  Internet speed is irrelevant.  Are you on a wired network or wireless?  If wired, is it a 100 Mb or 1000Mb switch?

Based on the answers to above, is you answered wireless, then I can see that as being your issue.  Ona  wired network, I would guess that even 100Mb should be sufficient as the WDTV hub doesn’t really work at gigabit speeds even though it has a gigabit adapter. 

14

crastan wrote:

Correct.  Internet speed is irrelevant.  Are you on a wired network or wireless?  If wired, is it a 100 Mb or 1000Mb switch?

 

Based on the answers to above, is you answered wireless, then I can see that as being your issue.  Ona  wired network, I would guess that even 100Mb should be sufficient as the WDTV hub doesn’t really work at gigabit speeds even though it has a gigabit adapter. 

I use cat5 ‘ethernet’ connection for streaming Netflix so I guess that’s wired, plus, there are no wifi on the HUB unless I use an adapter. As for home network, how do I go about to speed up things? It takes forever to move a file (5-10GB size). The main question is how do I watch a movie content from my laptop through the HUb with the TV without lagging and choppyness? Every time when I start a file from my computers, it takes forever and if it starts, it goes nowhere.

edit: by the way, how do I know if it’s 100 or 1000mb? i don’t have any switch, I just plug one end from my Linksys WRT54GS router and the other to the HUB.

15

Is the laptop connected via wireless network or ethernet?  If that’s wireless then the laptop is your bottleneck that is causing the lag.

16

^^All my laptops are connected via wireless from the Linksys router.

17

There’s your problem.  If you were streaming from your laptop over a wired connection, the hub would play it with no issues.  The culprit here is the slow connection your wireless notebook has.

18

crastan wrote:

There’s your problem.  If you were streaming from your laptop over a wired connection, the hub would play it with no issues.  The culprit here is the slow connection your wireless notebook has.

‘wired connectiion’ from where, from my laptop to the HUB???

But the whole point is to stream it wirelessly as a ‘network’. Say I wanted to stream something from my laptop in the bedroom upstairs to my living room downstairs, you mean I can’t unless I bring my laptop down and connect it to the HUB? In that case i wouldn’t to buy a WD player, all I have to do and run a an HDMI cable from any alptop to any TV.

19

You could connect your laptop via an ethernet cable to your modem / router and then everything would be wired. As has been said your weak point is the Wifi connection.

20

There is nothing wrong with the WDTV.  You are trying to share blu ray rips which are huge files off of your notebook wirelessly.  Your wireless connection at its max is 54 Mbps or 300 mbps depending on the router you have.  This rate is not the actual speed that you can move data across the link at!  This measurement is a specification.

Here are a few examples of typical max advertised speeds and actual TCP performance (from wifihowto.net) d:
802.11b Advertised: 11Mbps | Actual: 5-6Mbps
802.11g or 802.11a Advertised: 54Mbps | Actual: 25-30Mbps
802.11n (dual-stream) Advertised: 300Mbps | Actual: 150-160Mbps 

…and these are the absolute best you can expect-as you move around the house away from the router your rates are dropping.  Blu-Ray often requires as much as 40Mbps so if you have the best wireless connection possible, you would always have lag unless you have an 802.11n router.  What you should do is either hook up your notebook to your network via ethernet (most likely you have a 100Mbps connection) or buy a network attached storage drive and connect that to the ethernet network.