2011-02-17, 05:32
Figured I would vent out what I have been seeing after some quick testing. Ran into some buffering on ATV2 with a 720p .M4V file of How To Train Your Dragon. File sits on a synology nas. ATV2 is wireless on a N network. Played around a little with the wireless setting on a Cisco E3000 router and was only able to make slight improvement. Note Router sits in basement and ATV2 is on second floor and pretty much at the ceiling too. So it is a good long haul.
Next I ran a wired connection (Gigabit) to the ATV2 and it played perfect. Also checked file on a ATV1 wired and played perfect on that as well. So looks like the wireless connection is a possible problem.
However I then decide to open a itunes home share on my office PC and stream the file from there. PC wired but wireless to ATV2. No problems no buffering. And the progress bar showed the entire 2.5GB file loaded in about 5-7 minutes into the movie. So the wireless network is actually fast enough.
So how can we figure out how to get XBMC to handle the network like itunes and more importantly how to get it to write or buffer a larger part of the movie? What protocol is itunes homeshare using?
I feel like XBMC is only taking small chunks at a time and if you get a small network slowdown you run into problems as the buffer is not large enough and/or it is allowed to run to close to empty before pulling more content. But maybe that is part of the equation, maybe itunes is actually pushing content to the ATV2 where we have XBMC trying to pull to the ATV2.
Daville we need for you to work some more magic! I don't know maybe see if we can get some more temporary storage allocated or something. Got to be something we can do. Maybe figuring out the itunes home share may yield some insight.
Next I ran a wired connection (Gigabit) to the ATV2 and it played perfect. Also checked file on a ATV1 wired and played perfect on that as well. So looks like the wireless connection is a possible problem.
However I then decide to open a itunes home share on my office PC and stream the file from there. PC wired but wireless to ATV2. No problems no buffering. And the progress bar showed the entire 2.5GB file loaded in about 5-7 minutes into the movie. So the wireless network is actually fast enough.
So how can we figure out how to get XBMC to handle the network like itunes and more importantly how to get it to write or buffer a larger part of the movie? What protocol is itunes homeshare using?
I feel like XBMC is only taking small chunks at a time and if you get a small network slowdown you run into problems as the buffer is not large enough and/or it is allowed to run to close to empty before pulling more content. But maybe that is part of the equation, maybe itunes is actually pushing content to the ATV2 where we have XBMC trying to pull to the ATV2.
Daville we need for you to work some more magic! I don't know maybe see if we can get some more temporary storage allocated or something. Got to be something we can do. Maybe figuring out the itunes home share may yield some insight.
