Looking for Suggestions Unraid and media extender freezing

[Hunter69]

I have a WHS Sagetv Server with 1 HD300 and 2 HD200's. I have a unraid server with movies ripped to a share. I have always experienced freezing when streaming blu-ray movies. The freezing seems to be random. I always attributed the freezing to the spinup issue with unraid but I have seen where I will be streaming a movie and all seems ok (no freezing) till say 3/4 through the movie. I have attempted to solve this problem but cannot seem to track down what the issue is. Here is what I have going:

1. i have a gigabit network and the unraid server has a gigabit nic.
2. DVD's stream fine.
3. All blurays are ripped to a blu-ray folder structure.
4. None of the movies are split to different disks.
5. I am using mymovies on whs along the the sagetv plugin.
6. I have played movies on different disks to see if it was one disk that was causing the problem. I experienced freezing from multiple disks.

I have read that a lot of people are using unraid servers, so I figured I would post on this board looking for suggestions to assist me in solving this problem. Is anyone else experiencing/experienced the issue. If so how did you solve the issue.

Thanks for an help/suggestion

[SteveD]

Ping the ip of the unraid server 100 times to find the percentage of packet loss if any. Ping x.x.x.x -n 100. If there is packet loss, most likely the problem. It is probably being caused by the "assumed" 5.x version of unraid you are running.

Had a similar issue. I replaced the nic, problem stayed, downgraded unraid to 4.7 problem resolved.

Hope this helps.

[taylormadearmy]

Out of interest does the video freeze on both your HD300 and HD200 or just the HD300?

I've had similar issues (though using WHS, not unraid) with my HD300 but my HD200 works flawlessly in the same place...

[Hunter69]

I pinged the unraid server 100 times. No packet loss. Average ping of 0ms.

The videos freeze on both the hd200 and hd300.

I upgraded to 5.x at one time, then downgraded once the freezing got bad. So currently I am running V4.7 but I still exp freezing.

Today I removed the cache drive. It was an old drive that I reused. That drive cause me issues in the past but because it was the cache drive I thought there was no way it could be causing me problems. Things seemed better but I did not get to test things for very long.

[wrems]

I'd try a jperf test on your link between where your unraid box sits and your extender. This thread has info on how to do it for hd200 and hd300. It's probably easiest to put a laptop with a GigE lan card where your unraid box is and make it the server.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...30&postcount=1

I found a wiring issue with one of my keystones this way. My pings worked fine but I still had sporadic problems with playback. I was able to find and fix faults with my setup with jperf.

Worth a try in ruling things out.

[wikel]

had similar issue where dvd was fine but bluray would freeze on and off. found it was the server nic speed setting even though the bluray and dvd was off the nas and dtv hd over the server drive showed no issues... go figure

[SteveD]

Did you build your own uraid server? If so, did you use onboard sata controllers, and PCI-E sata II/III controllers. I had issues using a generic sata 150 pci card and a adaptec 1200 sata controller streaming blueray. If you use umenu on the unraid server, viewing the syslog will show where there are drive and network errors occurring on the unraid system.

Also, If you are using total media theater to play back the movies, it has a feature that you can enable that shows the bandwidth when you are streaming a movie. I notice you have HDPVRs, so you can load a copy of it on a PC and start playing a movie from the unraid server (right click while the movie is playing, a drop down menu appears, chose information) a dialog with network bandwidth and other components of the video will be displayed. When you see extreme spikes in the bandwidth is most likely when the issue is occurring, at these points the more information is being requested from the unraid hard drives than they can handle. (This is assuming you are using older hardware) A blueray playback from my unraid server on a 1 GIG network consumes about 25 Mbps. Blueray should stream fine on the average 100 meg network. You cacn use umenu to determine the disk read speeds of unraid server.

When I first set up my server, I discovered these issues and is the reason I use two pci-e controllers and the onboards controllers, no pci.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/inde...ID_Performance for information
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/FAQ - note the part on How fast is unraid. If your server is performing at the low end for read speeds, A 25Mbps blueray would have playback issues.

[mitchedo]

running Unraid version: 4.7-beta1 on a really old single core Athlon PC I cobbled together from leftover parts (I think it's an Athlon 2600+). I put an Intel Gigabit NIC in it. My Unraid parity disk is running on a PCI Promise SATA controller, so I'm set up about as wrong as you can get.

I built an AMD E350 APU system to watch BD rips. It was having intermittent, random, stutter. I disabled the onboard NIC in the E350 system, put in an Intel NIC, and the problem is gone. No problems whatsoever streaming to WD TV Live Streaming or the main WMC PC in the TV room (also with Intel NIC).