ATV2 and Time Capsule
#16
In fact this gives for me good results on Wifi, but when wired I'm always buffering... Need to check why, I have no clue at this time.

Tried to play also with receive buffer size with no success...
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#17
A few days ago i have also bought a Time capsule 2 Tb, but at the momente i am very disappointed. Befaore i stream all my movies, 720p and 1080p from my pc winth Windows 7 and i have had never buffer problem. With Time capsule is really a nightmare, because the movies continue to buffer repeatly, without difference between 720p and 1080p. With Samba is still worse. With AFP i have some random crash, and buffer is reduced but still there.
I have tried the tcp Ack, but buffer in wired connection is the same, while i have noticed an improvement in Wi-fi connection. In a topic that i have opened months ago, an user suggest infat to use wi-fi connection, but the problems remain and is very frustrating.
So i am really thinking to return back to the shop the Time capsule that is my really first disappointment since i use Apple products.
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#18
So, currently we can confirm that changing TCP ACK settings ONLY helps when using WiFi.

It's an important note so I'll add that to the wiki
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#19
Can somebody on a wired Time Capsule test to see if the line below gives any improvement ?


Code:
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1440
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#20
Sure, this evening i'll test this string and post the result.
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#21
Jester Wrote:Can somebody on a wired Time Capsule test to see if the line below gives any improvement ?

Tried to play with different settings, including mssdflt, wired, with no success at all. I'm using an old CAT5 cable, will try to buy a CAT6 to check.

I tried to check network speed and duplex mode (just to see if it is REALLY 100mb), but could not find information ? The ifconfig "media" parameters are not showed, nor accepted... Do somebody know how to access them ?
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#22
Same for me (of course on CAT6).

However, wifi is somewhat improved by thus.

On wired I noticed that the first 20-30 minutes there are noe issues. And then, it needs to buffer more and more. Until the end at the movie, it buffers quite frequently.

(And sometimes not at all ...)

Whats going on with ATV and TC ... this is so strange. Huh
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#23
I can confirm taht with wifi there is a great improvement of performance. In wired on the contrary, there is only a small improvement but only using also the secondo string as suggested. Maybe there are other parameters to change?
I think taht we are on the right road for the solution.
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#24
Hello,

This is my first post here but I am browsing the forums for a long time and as that helped me a lot with different XBMC setups I thought I would share some now as my current ATV2/TC is working pretty well.
I have ATV2 previous 4.3 firmware and latest nightly XBMC build which is 20111210. ATV2 is wired only and connected via good quality CAT5e cable (20 meters) to TC (1st gen) but the whole storage is on external cheap and quite old USB 2.5" Samsung drive (320 GB). My initial settings were automatic AFP and that have given a lot of buffering/crash issues. Now I use SMB, source added manualy typing the whole path. The first setting "net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1" helped a bit, the second was of no difference. I am on wired only. All in all the MKV 1080p files start to play 3-4 seconds after I hit a remote button. There is no buffering issues at all while watching the whole movie. Most of the time I can skip/fast forward to whatever point of movie I like. The box is responsive and quite stable - maybe 2 or 3 times on a really hard, insane use (choosing one file after another, stopping, playing, pausing, changing audio tracks) the XBMC crashed.
On the same box I have Firecore AVTBlack installed. Much easier to work with (especially for my family) but I prefer XBMC for the picture quality. What is interesting with the obvious settings I started from (AFP Auto Add Share) the ATVBlack was useless, waiting forever for file to load, crashes, out of memory errors. The SMB with tweaks cured that 100 % (ok. maybe 95 % Smile ). The only thing that sucks on ATV2 that it forces 50 Hz output and 24p files look horrible on my Panasonic plasma display. Again XBMC with 24p -> 50 Hz is much better, although still far from smooth.
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#25
Thank you for posting your experience and your fix. Can you make an example about you have configured your SMB connection with the Time Capsule? Excuse me but i am not very able about manually configure network connection. It would be fantastic if you can post an image of your config!

Thanks
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#26
radex Wrote:Hello,

This is my first post here but I am browsing the forums for a long time and as that helped me a lot with different XBMC setups I thought I would share some now as my current ATV2/TC is working pretty well.
I have ATV2 previous 4.3 firmware and latest nightly XBMC build which is 20111210. ATV2 is wired only and connected via good quality CAT5e cable (20 meters) to TC (1st gen) but the whole storage is on external cheap and quite old USB 2.5" Samsung drive (320 GB). My initial settings were automatic AFP and that have given a lot of buffering/crash issues. Now I use SMB, source added manualy typing the whole path. The first setting "net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1" helped a bit, the second was of no difference. I am on wired only. All in all the MKV 1080p files start to play 3-4 seconds after I hit a remote button. There is no buffering issues at all while watching the whole movie. Most of the time I can skip/fast forward to whatever point of movie I like. The box is responsive and quite stable - maybe 2 or 3 times on a really hard, insane use (choosing one file after another, stopping, playing, pausing, changing audio tracks) the XBMC crashed.
On the same box I have Firecore AVTBlack installed. Much easier to work with (especially for my family) but I prefer XBMC for the picture quality. What is interesting with the obvious settings I started from (AFP Auto Add Share) the ATVBlack was useless, waiting forever for file to load, crashes, out of memory errors. The SMB with tweaks cured that 100 % (ok. maybe 95 % Smile ). The only thing that sucks on ATV2 that it forces 50 Hz output and 24p files look horrible on my Panasonic plasma display. Again XBMC with 24p -> 50 Hz is much better, although still far from smooth.

Just a tip. XBMC might get influenced by FireCore Mediaplayer (due to the architecture of atv2 ios and the fact the firecore and xbmc bring some different lib versions with them for the same thing). It isn't recommended to have both installed at a time.

Just keep this in mind whenever you experience crashes or something like that ...
AppleTV4/iPhone/iPod/iPad: HowTo find debug logs and everything else which the devs like so much: click here
HowTo setup NFS for Kodi: NFS (wiki)
HowTo configure avahi (zeroconf): Avahi_Zeroconf (wiki)
READ THE IOS FAQ!: iOS FAQ (wiki)
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#27
Benjopa Wrote:Thank you for posting your experience and your fix. Can you make an example about you have configured your SMB connection with the Time Capsule? Excuse me but i am not very able about manually configure network connection. It would be fantastic if you can post an image of your config!

I'm afraid you may be disapointed... He is using a 1st gen TC. I got one, 512MB, and never experienced problems with it (SMB was working well with XBMC ATV2, wired, without any specific optimisations).

Problems came when it died and I changed to a 2To 4th gen... Same settings, same ethernet cable, same files, but basically unusable wired on ATV... Fortunatly, it works correctly now on most case on wifi (yes, Avatar plays well Wink ).
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#28
Benjopa Wrote:Thank you for posting your experience and your fix. Can you make an example about you have configured your SMB connection with the Time Capsule? Excuse me but i am not very able about manually configure network connection. It would be fantastic if you can post an image of your config!

Thanks

Here is a good tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTBspxh7CgI

What I did was leaving the user name and password fields blank and granting guest access on TC for now. But I believe setting a password is a choice you can make, it's only for access purposes and shouldn't influence the transfer rate.

Very interesting to hear about the TC generations issues. I was planning to replace mine with later model for capacity, dual band and...age of course. But what you are saying about the later gens made me reconsider. So, leaving the TC alone, what is the best, cheap solution for USB based (for disc access) Ethernet SMB of AFP device to work with ATV2? USB equipped router?

BTW: Anyone succeded to force ATV working with 60 Hz instead of 50 Hz on Euro Spec TVs?
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#29
OK, good news (at least for me). I definitly solved my problems, and without obscure tweaks of the ATV2 (sysctl.conf removed and ATV2, wired again).

The problem lied on a TC parameter. I used (before also) the value "local" as the domain name for my network. This was to permit local name resolution on home network, without a local DNS server, using bonjour. With this setting it was possible to ping all my systems by name (server instead of server.local).

Removing this, all work fine again. I suspect there is an obscure conflict with the zeroconf capabilities of the newer nightlies, not a problem with the new gen TC itself (I did not watch those HD movies since a long time, but I used them to "burn" the new configuration, and came to bad assumptions).


Errata - nothing to do with "local" domain - maybe one day I will learn not to make more than one change at a time...

In fact the problem seems to be solved by forcing the WAN port mode. Maybe a bug in speed negociation with my modem. Did not have this before.


For those interested the TCP configuration is (more or less good translation since the TC is in french) :
- Connection via ethernet to a cable modem (WAN forced 100M full duplex)
- Share a public IP address
- Configuration via DHCP, DNS, domain name set to "local" and DHCP client id not set (empty)
- 10.0.x LAN
- PMP-NAT activated (need to check what it is exactly someday)

Will get back to DHCP reservation and hosts editing for name resolution Wink.

Regards,
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#30
bonic38 Wrote:I'm afraid you may be disapointed... He is using a 1st gen TC. I got one, 512MB, and never experienced problems with it (SMB was working well with XBMC ATV2, wired, without any specific optimisations).

Problems came when it died and I changed to a 2To 4th gen... Same settings, same ethernet cable, same files, but basically unusable wired on ATV... Fortunatly, it works correctly now on most case on wifi (yes, Avatar plays well Wink ).

Unfortunately you had reason. That type of configuration was useless and tha buffer problem remain.

This evening I'll try to change the Time Capsule configuration as suggested by Bionic. Hope fine!

Thanks to everybody
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