Urgent help with WDTV SMP

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Guys, I need you help PLEASE. I have been wrecking my brain for the past couple of days, re-installing WHS 2011, FlexRAID, even formatted my hard drives on the server and checked them. Everything is fine on the server end.

  1. My issue is that my WDTV LIVE SMP, for some reason, starts buffering very often on 1080p mkv movies. I get that circular arrow in the middle of the screen for a few seconds, the movie pauses but then resumes after about 4-5 seconds.

The hard drives are fine and the server is connected to the network at 1Gbps. Everything is connected through the router.

  1. Usually when this happens and I get to the end of a show or movie I have a pop-up that comes up as “There is no medial content in the selected folder” or something along those lines. And I have to go into the change source option at the top -->Windows Shares–>WHS, etc…

Also, the only time my shows and movies are in aphabetical order is when I select the share, via the windows shares method on the local network.

If I filter by “My Medica Library” than the show episodes, and movie names are all out of order…

I would really appreiate some help guys as it makes movie watching absolutely un-acceptable since it occasionally pauses and buffers. And sometimes all of a sudden says on media is found in the folder.

Any idea why this is happening and how I could fix it? Would really appreciate it guys.

2

So your WD is hard wired also, not WiFi?

3

  • Did you check the router settings, like QoS (quality of service) …?

  • I do not know WHS, but I know in Win7 you can “optimize” folders for Video-playback or something like that… Itś in the   properties settings of the folder

  • Is there perhaps a lan-switchbox between WHS and router that causes the problem?

Playing 1080p with the smp over a wired connection should not be a problem

  • How’s playback of 1080p via the network to your computer? If that works alright, I guess it cancels out problems with the network-throughput.
4

Thanks guys.

it is connected via a wired connection.

There is no problem streaming that same file to my laptop.

The router is a pretty good Linksys E3000 series. I believe E3200.

Yes, there should be absolutely no problem with this. I disabled “My Media Library” (whatever it’s called within wdtv) and just went to tge location by sleecting WHS and the specific share.

Doing that made it improve a little, and I had fewer pauses throughout, but still had some, which is just unbelievable. I don’t know what happened all of a sudden other than the fact that I installed FlexRAID…

But again, no issues streaming to laptop

5

Do these same videos play OK if played via a direct-attached USB disk attached to the WDTV?

6

As the only thing you changed is installing FlexRaid, can that be the problem?

I do not know FlexRAID, actually I do not have experience with RAID at all, but what I do know is that Soft(ware)-RAID can be quite processor-intensive (for instance in case of RAID4, RAID5).  This all depends of course on your system specs, 

I was wondering whether the combination of a low power processor (like mine, AMD fusion E350) + running several servers + SoftRAID + high bitrate 1080p video streaming can be a bit too much…

Perhaps you already checked this, but if you put a 1080p-video on another computer (not your FlexRAID WHS) and share this video from this computer over the network to your smp, what happens then? Does it play fine? 

7

Good idea to try streaming it from another computer.

Playing the same video from USB plays fine.

What about the “My Media Library?” Anything I should know about that?
 And how come when I add a share to my media library, than go to videos and open the folders, the movie names and episode numbers are not sorted alphabetically!

But, if I dont go through my media library, and instead navigate to the folder by selecting, networtk share, WHS, and then select the share that way, then everyhing is sorted correctly but the option to “Get Info” is not there for cover art, etc…

Lastly,  and perhaps more importantly, why would I often get a message that says “no media found in folder” and I would have to re-navigate to the network share to get everything to display again.

8

maxse wrote:

What about the “My Media Library?” Anything I should know about that?
 And how come when I add a share to my media library, than go to videos and open the folders, the movie names and episode numbers are not sorted alphabetically!

Open the folder , press the green button and check ‘Sorting’: it should be ‘Alphabetical’.

My movies are in alphabetical order, no problems with that.

maxse wrote:

But, if I dont go through my media library, and instead navigate to the folder by selecting, networtk share, WHS, and then select the share that way, then everyhing is sorted correctly but the option to “Get Info” is not there for cover art, etc…

Metadata-feature is only available when using ‘Medialibrary’.

maxse wrote:

Lastly,  and perhaps more importantly, why would I often get a message that says “no media found in folder” and I would have to re-navigate to the network share to get everything to display again.

My experience is that after adding folders and/or moviefiles the smp needs a manual rescan, which by the way is a matter of seconds. If you want to want to wait till the unit rescans automatically you will grow a beard (bug??).

The setup that works for me is using ‘My Medialibrary’, filter (green button) by ‘Folders’, ‘Sorting’: alphabetically. In ‘Setup" Get Content Info-Manual Only (when I have downloaded a Series with a lot of episodes, I usually change it to ‘Auto’ and after that back to "Manual-Only’ again). If you have the file-naming right (using ‘dots’ like moviename.2010.whatever.mkv and for series seriesname.S01E02.whatever.mkv generally it will work fine.

Nevertheless, now and then I (need to) restart the unit to get everything right. Why? I don’t know, I guess file-sharing over a network, buiding a medialibrary and updating it is a ‘complex’ process and there are a lot af factors that can make it go wrong. 100%-flawless seems not to exist in the world of mediaplayers and computers in general.

Once you have your setup and filenaming right, try deleting and rebuilding the medialibrary. Once it works you will have those messages far less. Once you know the tricks to get things done the wd-tv live is not too bad at all, I own two units and like them a lot!