Networking Help!

[Xiphoid]

Okay, I first have to preface this post by saying I'm a total amateur when it comes to networking.

I started looking into why I had some stuttering when playing DVDs on my HD300 being served across my network from my SageTV server. The SageTV folks had me run iperf to measure the speed of my connection between the HD300 and my SageTV server. The speeds it measures is in/around 10 Mbytes/sec, and for the life of me I can't get that number to be any higher than that, and I'm guessing that this is one reason why DVDs might stutter on playback, right?

I have a Cisco wireless gigabit router with 4 wired connections (WRT610 is the specific model number). My SageTV server has a gigabit ethernet which the router appears to confirm for me that it's connecting at a gigabit connection (because the lights on the router are green when it's a gigabit connection, blue if 10/100 connection). My house is brand new and wired with cat5 wiring to all the rooms. To first make sure I could rule out a faulty wiring, I took all my equipment into my office, connected it all directly to the router rather than going through the house wiring, and I still get 10 Mbytes/sec. Next, I took a wireless-N USB and connected that to my server (literally 3 feet away from my router), and I still got around 10 Mbytes/sec. In other words, I can't get anything more than 10 Mbytes/sec through my router. Doesn't this sound slow?

How can I improve the speed of the network? It seems to me that this wireless gigabit router should be moving data around at speeds faster than 10 Mbytes/sec, no?

[KeithAbbott]

Just for comparison, I have a gigabit network, and I am getting 75,916,567 bytes per second writing, 92,653,920 bytes per second reading using LAN Speed Test software (http://www.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.html).

You said that your house is wired with cat5 wiring, I have not had success getting cat5 to work with gigabit, you probably need cat5e or cat6 wiring for reliable gigabit speeds.

[stevech]

10 megabytes per second = 80megabits of net data = close to 100Mbps at the ethernet layer, net of overhead. That's plenty of speed for HD. Without gigE.
If you're trying to move streaming video at HD on WiFi: Don't. Use MoCA or cat5.

If the LAN is supposed to be gigabit, then perhaps some switch in the system would show link lights that are 10 or 100BT and not gigE

(don't mix-up bits and bytes. A byte is 8 bits. Conventionally, Mbps is megabits/sec and MBps is megabytes/sec. )

[Xiphoid]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Just for comparison, I have a gigabit network, and I am getting 75,916,567 bytes per second writing, 92,653,920 bytes per second reading using LAN Speed Test software (http://www.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.html).

You said that your house is wired with cat5 wiring, I have not had success getting cat5 to work with gigabit, you probably need cat5e or cat6 wiring for reliable gigabit speeds.

Sorry - I should clarify, house is wired with cat5e. And I tested with factory-manufactured cat5e shorter ethernet cables during my testing as well, in case there were some flaws in the pre-wired house wiring.

I also tested with both my laptop as the server and the HD300 as the client as well as my desktop (normal Sagetv server).

[KeithAbbott]

I don't know about the HD300 wireless connection, but the HD300 wired connection is only 10/100, not gigabit. So your maximum speed using a wired connection between your server and the hd300 wouldn't be much more than 10 Mbytes/sec anyway (see post by stevech).

[KeithAbbott]

Couple more questions come to mind. Are you playing DVDs ripped to the server hard drive, or are you playing the physical DVD mounted in the DVD drive on the server? If you are playing the physical DVD, you might want to rip one to the hard drive, and see if it plays without stuttering. If it plays without stuttering, you've just eliminated the network from being the problem. Also, are HD channels from your HD-PVR stuttering? If not, then the network is again probably not to blame, since HD should need more network bandwidth than a standard DVD would.

[Xiphoid]

Ripped DVDs to the server hard drive. If I play ripped DVDs through the HD Theatre use SageTV on my server, it stutters. If I play ripped DVDs on the HD300 when running as a media extender, they don't stutter. Same thing happens (albeit slightly less) with recorded HD content.

(as an aside, with all my tinkering I seem to have SEVERELY slowed my network down from what it was before, as stuttering is even worse now, barely playable...but I'll have to figure out what I changed to get it back to what I had before)

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by Xiphoid

If I play ripped DVDs through the HD Theatre use SageTV on my server, it stutters. If I play ripped DVDs on the HD300 when running as a media extender, they don't stutter.)

I'm not sure I understand the difference between these two. Are you saying that playing ripped DVDs using the HD300 in standalone mode, they don't stutter, but when you use the HD300 as a media extender with SageTV as the server, it does stutter?

In any case, it sounds like there is one mode that you can operate the HD300 whereby no stuttering occurs. That being the case, that probably rules out the network from being the culprit. Is your computer a dedicated SageTV server, or is it a multi-purpose workstation?

[Xiphoid]

When you first boot up the HD300, you get the blue screen with a UI that looks a lot like SageTV 6.x...know what I mean? At that point you have the option of connecting to the SageTV server, or you can just choose to remain disconnected and play media from any device on the network. Alternatively, if I connect to the server, the UI looks like the SageTV 7.0 UI. Know what I mean?

If I navigate a ripped DVD on the Sage server when I'm in 'network playing' mode (blue background), the DVD plays perfect. However, if I connect to SageTV 7.0 on my server and play the same ripped DVD it stutters.

The server is multi-purpose, but it's rarely used for anything other than running SageTV.

[KeithAbbott]

Since the ripped DVD plays perfect when you use the HD300 in stand-alone mode, I don't think it's a network problem. Have you tried viewing the DVD using the UI/client on the SageTV server itself? If it still stutters, then the problem is on the SageTV server itself.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by Xiphoid

(as an aside, with all my tinkering I seem to have SEVERELY slowed my network down from what it was before, as stuttering is even worse now, barely playable...but I'll have to figure out what I changed to get it back to what I had before)

It sounds to me like you might have a bad switch. I banned Linksys/Cisco from my house a couple of years back, due to the same issues you were seeing. I spent a good month or so, switching out Cables, NIC's, making windows tweaks, driver upgrades, Switching from NAS to local disks etc... I always had an issue, but my six month old linksys switches always said I had gig to all gig connections and 100mbps to the hdhr's and hd200s'etc... I even sent packet captures from Wireshark to SageTV support to see if they could tell me what all the packet drops were from. When I switched out the linksys switches with Netgear, every problem with packet loss, studdering and speed issues went away. Linksys lost my trust for any type of networking equipment for my house after that. WMMV with linksys but I am happier without it.

[ayjax]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

It sounds to me like you might have a bad switch. I banned Linksys/Cisco from my house a couple of years back, due to the same issues you were seeing. I spent a good month or so, switching out Cables, NIC's, making windows tweaks, driver upgrades, Switching from NAS to local disks etc... I always had an issue, but my six month old linksys switches always said I had gig to all gig connections and 100mbps to the hdhr's and hd200s'etc... I even sent packet captures from Wireshark to SageTV support to see if they could tell me what all the packet drops were from. When I switched out the linksys switches with Netgear, every problem with packet loss, studdering and speed issues went away. Linksys lost my trust for any type of networking equipment for my house after that. WMMV with linksys but I am happier without it.

I too had the same issue with Linksys/Cisco WRV54G I think it was. Slow network, slow xfer speeds and although I am not using a Sage client I was seeing this on everything else I was doing on the network... I too thought it was my Realtek NICs and went and got a Intel NIC for testing but it did not help. Eventualy went and got a Netgear WNR3500 and all is good now.

Maybe you can borrow another router from somewhere (a friend maybe) and see if it fixes the issue ??

[stevech]

I found that early consumer grade ($50) gigE switches all overheated and self destructed. One Linksys and one D-Link. I think the gen-1 chipsets were crummy.

I now have three: second gen Netgear runs cool. And an even cheaper Fry's house brand (2ea). Works fine.

[Nelbert]

What happens if you force all you're ports to 100 megabit and disable all auto-negotiation including the server?

I've seen issues where having one device at 1Gbit and the others all at 100Mbit can wreck havoc with traffic.

Cheap equipment (and some not so cheap) used to suffer from not being able to run all ports at full speed and/or have large enough buffers to cope with speed differences on continuous data transfers.

Have you monitored the server itself? Running task manager showing cpu usage for a start. If I understand you only have stutters when running as an extender or directly on the server, and not when just using the server as a file share in standalone mode.

[Xiphoid]

Viewing the DVD on the server itself works fine, so I know the server isn't slow. The router is only a year old or so, but I could be faulty. I'm not sure how to force my ports to 100 Meg, any idea how to do that in vista?

[rrhorer]

You can try turning off Network Throttling (search for other posts on Throttling or "ThrottlingIndex" to get the specific registry change that is needed). This was an issue for me with both Vista (where it was first introduced) and Windows 7. It gives preference to media streaming by penalizing other network traffic. However, it is not really needed for that purpose if you have a reasonably good setup; and, it can play havoc with yur Sage network setup.

[Xiphoid]

If anyone reads this thread, I fixed the problem by modifying the network card to force it to full duplex 100megs, rather than auto negotiation which it was set at before.