[SOLVED] 4K file playback from UnRAID - buffering issue?

[Roscoe62]

Hi all,

 

I've been using UnRAID a long time and have been very satisfied with the performance. I'm a home theater 'hobbyist', and have started playing with saving my 4K UHD collection on UnRAID and streaming to my current player - a Zappiti mini 4K HDR player.

 

I'm currently using MakeMKV to rip the main movie to an mkv file and streaming from UnRAID. As I said, I've only recently been playing with this and it seems to have worked OK with my experiments so far.

 

The other day I bought the Lord of the Rings 4K boxset and put the first half of the extended version of the Fellowship on the server. I wanted to see how the Zappiti would handle this, and so I settled in to watch for a while. It got as far as just a moment past the 'Fellowship of the Ring' title, and then it stopped playing, and I got an error message displaying 'Can't Play Video'.

Our media center is at the other end of the house from the server, and I'd never seen this before so I've started trying to figure out where the issue is occurring.

 

My main PC is in another area of the house, and I have PowerDVD 20 Ultra installed, so I brought up the UnRAID menu, set it to show system stats and started playing it from there - I know this doesn't replicate the issue I saw on the Zappiti, but I'm a little suspicious of some kind of network issue so I thought this would at least give me some information.

 

Playing back the movie file via PowerDVD did introduce some buffering - especially at the beginning, but after the first minute or so its playback was stable. I captured an image of the UnRAID stats while the file played, and I've attached that here. I'd like to know if these stats are 'reasonable' - i.e. is this a problem, or should I look elsewhere.

 

FWIW - here are some of the stats of my UnRAID system -

M/B: Supermicro - X10SRiF

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1620 v4 @3.5GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Enabled

Cache: 256kB, 1024kB, 10240kB

Memory: 16 GB

Network: eth0: 100 Mb/x, full duplex, mtu 1500

eth1 : not connected

 

Although I've used UnRAID a long time I'm definitely not a power-user and linux/unix commands still make me nervous. Having said all that - I'm grateful for any help or advice you could provide....

 

 

 

[ChatNoir]

Is it normal that your network is only at 100Mbps ?

Your board is capable of 1000Mbps.

 

You should attach your diagnostics to your next post (tools / diagnostics)

[Squid]

You may also consider updating the OS.  Based on the copyright, it looks like you're running 6.3.5 while the latest stable version is 6.8.3

[Roscoe62]

12 hours ago, ChatNoir said:

Is it normal that your network is only at 100Mbps ?

Your board is capable of 1000Mbps.

 

You should attach your diagnostics to your next post (tools / diagnostics)

Diagnostics attached as requested.

 

I'm embarrassed to say I had this same question when I first fired this build of the server up and noticed it - but I never followed up. I just figured if the board was capable of 1000Mbps it would have just started up that way (yes, I know that's lazy logic!). So, if the board is capable of 1000Mbps, how do I enable that? Is it a BIOS thing, or are there settings I can use in UnRAID?

 

What are my options here?

server-diagnostics-20210209-0800.zip

[Roscoe62]

4 hours ago, Squid said:

You may also consider updating the OS.  Based on the copyright, it looks like you're running 6.3.5 while the latest stable version is 6.8.3

Yes, I'm currently running 6.3.5. I haven't updated as I never had a specific need to update. I'm not sure what the update would give me, but yes - I guess it makes sense to use the latest stable version.

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, Roscoe62 said:

So, if the board is capable of 1000Mbps, how do I enable that?

Ethernet autonegotiates the speed, so check the physical condition of the sockets at both ends of the cable, the cable itself, and the capabilities of the equipment at the other end of the cable.

[Roscoe62]

So, I got stuck into looking into the problem.

I found the motherboard manual and went through details of how to enter the bios. However, the manual went into a lot of detail about the parameters that could be changed in the bios, and it didn't look like there was any selection you could make that would change the speed (as you correctly point out jonathanm).

Out where the UnRAID server is I have a Linksys 16 port switch with a number of spare ports, so I tried a different port - no change. I had a couple of spare cat6 cables in the office, so I opened one and switched out the cable. Initially nothing happened, but then the yellow LED lit up on the switch to indicate a gigabit connection, and the lan port on the server also glowed a different color.

 

So, I pulled up the system stats page on UnRAID, went out to the lounge and fired up the FOTR movie again - I got past the earlier failure point without any problems, and gave up after 25 minutes - it was rock-solid stable.

 

I also took a picture of the stats shown by UnRAID, and I think they tell an interesting picture...

 

What can be seen now is - the network transmit graph shows peaks as high as, say, 110 Mb/s - whereas - in the earlier picture - it looked like the transmit was hitting a ceiling of about 90 Mb/s.

 

I believe this has SOLVED the issue. I'd be seriously embarrassed, but I'm too busy being relieved.

 

Thanks to all, but especially to ChatNoir who pointed me in the right direction. You guys are awesome!