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2013-05-22, 09:12
(This post was last modified: 2013-05-22, 09:13 by Mito72.)
Ok this is my first time posting a question here. I hope someone here could chime in. I have for the longest time had a desktop PC running xbmc connected to my hd tv in living room running my 720-1080p MKV files of external hardrives with no stuttering issues ect. Since my collection has been growing. I decided to place 2nd pc in garage and hardwire via Ethernet to my home network so all my external hardrives are now connected to my garage PC and streaming everything thru wired network to my living room PC. The problem now is that I get buffering and stuttering problems.
My question is, which pc needs to be faster (which pc is actually doing all the work) I have my newer pc in garage and the older pc in living room should I switch them & see if it fixes my problem. This is my first trial at streaming via home network and frankly if I can't fix issue I might go back to having just one PC with a lot of clutter.
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Im not an expert but one question i would ask is, are those external hard drive NAS or just external drives connected to your pc?
Is this your set up - EXT HDD -> Living room PC -> Garage PC?
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They are just external hardrives connected to garage pc. My living room xbmc pc connects to those via windows SMB
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right...then it depends on how good your living room pc is then to process that info and send it across.
You can either swap the PC's as you suggested and see if that makes a difference or see if there is a way to convert those external drive to NAS using a NAS enclosure or see if your router allows you to plug in USB drives into it as sometime some router have that capability.
Also do you know if all your two PC's and router are Gigabit connections?
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Yes two pcs and router are gigabit connections. I will switch out computers and see if that solves the problem. So just making sure I have this straight. The PC in the living room recieving information via SMB connection needs to be the faster of the two is this correct?
Or does the PC in garage (where all external hardrives are connected) needs to be the faster one?
By the way Thank you for all of your help, it is very appreciated.
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I would suspect the issue lies with the external HDDs and not the computer itself. My media used to be streamed from a Synology NAS that ran with a 1.2GHz single core processor and 256MB of RAM. It would stream 1:1 BDD rips without issue. So I don't think it would be the PC, but I can't be sure.
An easy test would be to transfer one of the movies directly to the HDD of the computer in the garage and try it that way. If it works, then you've found your bottle neck.
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I will try this and see if it solves the issues. Thank you
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I'd also double-check your network connections for any packet loss and/or abnormal latencies too - that can cause a whole host of issues.
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I agree with thethirdnut. Network might be a big issue and shouldn't be overlooked.
I don't understand why it matters which PC is faster as true_devil suggests. If both PC's are fast enough then there should be no problem as long as they are both up to the task.
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2013-05-22, 17:53
(This post was last modified: 2013-05-22, 17:57 by outatouch0.)
What is the temperature like in your garage? I might have been able to bake a cake in my garage yesterday! Simple heat could be an issue.
Did you use cat5 or cat6 network cables? Did you splice the connections yourself? A bad insert on the plug can slow your transfer speeds - happened to me BTW.
+1 on trying moving a movie from the external HDD to the internal HDD in the garage (enable sharing on the folder you put it in) first.
If the problem persists:
See if you can get a cheap network cable tester.
See if there are some settings in your router that need to be adjusted (manufactures user forum hopefully can help you).
Changing the computers around is the last thing I would try - this is most likely to be irrelevant and the most work.
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After spending some time testing. It turns out I still had some programs running in background that we're affecting streaming. (Plex media server, air video server an unneeded copy of photo stream) after disabling these items I am able once again to stream 1080p video. I also moved movies with large file size to actual PC instead of the external hardrives and all seems to be well. Before all this 1080p movies would play but within 5 minutes it would stutter and quit. Now videos play all the way thru. It's hard to believe that these 3 programs were affecting everything so much. Thank you all for your help it was really appreciated. I didn't really want to move all of those external hardrives back to the living room.
