Problem playing from blu-ray disc in drive

[negativeZero]

I'm having difficulty getting a movie to play smoothly when sourced directly from a Blu-Ray disc in the drive. I have SageTV v7.0.23.246 running on my WindowsXP machine with a LiteOn iHOS104-06 4x Blu-Ray reader attached.

I added the drive letter to Sage as an import directory; it scans the disc in the drive just fine and adds it to the 'Videos>DVD/BD' list. When I play the movie, however, it appears extremely choppy. My impression is that I'll get a split second of motion video, the video will freeze during which time a split second of audio will play. This continues indefinitely. I have tried multiple discs with the same result.

I don't think it's a codec issue since I can play the same movie off the hard drive without issue. Nor do I think it's a inherent drive speed limitation because I was able to rip the nearly 2-hour movie to hard-disk in less than 40 minutes; input rate definitely faster than output rate. I'm wondering if Sage is just using a suboptimal buffering scheme from the disc... both the Blu-Ray drive and my hard-disk activity lights are on pretty much solid when I'm trying to playback from the Blu-Ray drive.

My ultimate goal is to be able to stream directly from the disc to my HD300. I have tried this and get the exact same choppy behavior on the extender as I get when attempting the play the movie from within the Sage client on my Windows PC.

Does anyone else have this kind of problem playing directly from a Blu-Ray disc? Is there a parameter I need to modify in the properties file to adjust the buffering scheme or drive speed? Thanks very much for reading; any ideas or suggestions are appreciated!

nZ

[Fuzzy]

Do you have AnyDVDHD running on the system hosting the drive?

[negativeZero]

Fuzzy,

Yes, AnyDVD HD 6.7.7.0 is installed on the PC with the drive.

I also meant to note that VLC can play .m2ts files directly from every Blu-Ray disc I've tried without issue. I believe this is evidence that it is not an inherent drive speed limitation nor a bottleneck introduced by AnyDVD.

Thanks,
nZ

[hockeyfan]

I've had this problem all the time. I've tried various settings in the config file as recommended by certain threads. Some people have also found networking hardware (1G switches) were causing their problem. For me it never was fixed.

I ended up buying a blu-ray player to watch movies immediately without ripping them.

I'm running win2k3 server and I always figured it was down to a driver issue, not being optimized for the demands that blu-ray would require over the network. I'm thinking that if I bought\installed windows home server this problem would go away.

[sflamm]

The switch can definitely have an effect - I've found cheap switches to present problems. Eliminate that kind of variable.

Also - turn off Flow Control. On a home network there should be no need and low end switches sometimes have issues with that.

Lastly, make sure you are not running any Anti-virius etc on the server -- as it will scan the stream in realtime and definitely cause it to be all choppy. Disable.

Hope that helps.

[negativeZero]

I'm quite certain the issue I was seeing isn't related to networking since the choppiness was also observed on the PC hosting the Blu-Ray drive and SageTV locally.

I have, however, had some progress towards resolution. I've found that if I run the Sage server as a service without the client front-end, I'm able to stream to my extender from the disc smoothly. I did encounter one frame-freeze last night during a 2-hour movie; I had to clear it manually by pausing then un-pausing play. This may or may not be related to using the Blu-Ray disc as a source but I've never seen a freeze when the source is from harddisk.