October 6, 201213 yr Ever since I started serving my movies (HD mkv files ~ 8 gig to 18 gig) from Unraid I am getting considerable playback distortion only when a scene pans quickly (any type of fast movement). I use XBMC and prior to using unRaid I was playing back from external hard drives over usb 2 with no issues. Any thoughts?
October 6, 201213 yr What kinds of bit rates are these movies running at during these scenes? These video files may have too high of a bit-rate. Try encoding the files to a lower bit-rate. I would try using Handbrakes High Profile or Normal setting, it should get you a video that is very close to the original with a lower bit-rate that can be streamed over the network. I don't know if the videos that you are using have DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD try removing these audio tracks from the MKV and using regular DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1.
October 6, 201213 yr Ever since I started serving my movies (HD mkv files ~ 8 gig to 18 gig) from Unraid I am getting considerable playback distortion only when a scene pans quickly (any type of fast movement). I use XBMC and prior to using unRaid I was playing back from external hard drives over usb 2 with no issues. Any thoughts? Re-encoding your video files is not the solution. Could you possibly try another video server program, just for testing? Do you have a media player, or just an HTPC only? You should be able to play any of your videos from your unraid box. Your drives are external, connected how through your network then onto USB?
October 7, 201213 yr From his first post he did not mention using a video sever program at all, I assumed he was using a SMB Share to stream the unaltered file. If he is using a video server then his transcoder needs to be tweaked or try a new one. If not using a video server and don't want to re-encode a good video sever with on the fly transcoding should work. Personally 18 GB videos a way overkill, I can't tell the difference between a blu-ray and my 4 to 6 GB rips.
October 7, 201213 yr From his first post he did not mention using a video sever program at all, I assumed he was using a SMB Share to stream the unaltered file. If he is using a video server then his transcoder needs to be tweaked or try a new one. If not using a video server and don't want to re-encode a good video sever with on the fly transcoding should work. Personally 18 GB videos a way overkill, I can't tell the difference between a blu-ray and my 4 to 6 GB rips. Wow, really? The picture difference on my TV between a real bluray and a regular DVD is night and day difference. I can tell instantly. That of course has to do with the quality of the TV to. I have the Sony flagship full array LED Bravia model which to me is the best picture quality TV I have ever seen to date. I'm still in awe when I sit down and watch HDTV on regular TV then when watching a BD the quality is even better. All eye candy.
October 7, 201213 yr From his first post he did not mention using a video sever program at all, I assumed he was using a SMB Share to stream the unaltered file. If he is using a video server then his transcoder needs to be tweaked or try a new one. If not using a video server and don't want to re-encode a good video sever with on the fly transcoding should work. Personally 18 GB videos a way overkill, I can't tell the difference between a blu-ray and my 4 to 6 GB rips. Wow, really? The picture difference on my TV between a real bluray and a regular DVD is night and day difference. I can tell instantly. That of course has to do with the quality of the TV to. I have the Sony flagship full array LED Bravia model which to me is the best picture quality TV I have ever seen to date. I'm still in awe when I sit down and watch HDTV on regular TV then when watching a BD the quality is even better. All eye candy. They are not DVD rips they are 1080p/720p blu-ray rips ripped with handbrake using h.264 codec on constant quality. But most of my rips are 720p for my iPad, still not much of a difference can be seen on a tv if you bump up the bit rate. My 720p videos tend to be about 2 to 3 GB. I have played both 720p and 1080p of the same video on a 55 inch Samsung LED 8000 TV and can't really tell the difference. I am not a videophile so a much more trained eye may be able to see the difference. So to me a 10GB+ savings in hard drive space for a quality loss that I can not detect is a nobrainer.
October 7, 201213 yr If you can't tell the difference between crappy recodes and original Blu-ray, either: 1) You have a crap TV 2) Your TV was never calibrated 3) Your eyes are broken 3 is the most common.
October 7, 201213 yr There is definitely a difference in sharpness, (focus calibration) and depth (darker scenes, shadows, black level calibration) and overall "brilliance"). Calibration does make a difference.
October 7, 201213 yr Ever since I started serving my movies (HD mkv files ~ 8 gig to 18 gig) from Unraid I am getting considerable playback distortion only when a scene pans quickly (any type of fast movement). I use XBMC and prior to using unRaid I was playing back from external hard drives over usb 2 with no issues. Any thoughts? Lots and lots of things can be going wrong but can we start with the network? Is it wired? 10/100? GigE? Wireless? The bitrate for unencoded blurays is up to 54 mbps. I don't know to what rate your videos have been encoded but it's worth a peek. Less likely would be an issue with the disks but just to be sure: what disks are you running on your unraid data drives? SATA? IDE? The other thing to do is to run a tool like nmon (or nettop) on linux or looking at the network monitor in windows. Those tools will show you how quickly data is arriving on your XBMC node. *Edited because I got the bluray bitrate wrong.
October 7, 201213 yr Ever since I started serving my movies (HD mkv files ~ 8 gig to 18 gig) from Unraid I am getting considerable playback distortion only when a scene pans quickly (any type of fast movement). I use XBMC and prior to using unRaid I was playing back from external hard drives over usb 2 with no issues. Any thoughts? What kind of playback distortion? Break-ups in sound and videos? Sudden slowdown in playback? Those are most-likely bandwith problems (network or disk, most likely network) . I play full bluray backups with HD audio through my Dune 3.0 Base mediaplayer which has only a 100 Mbit NIC without any issue. Both from my QNAP NAS and unraid server. What are the specs of your unraid server and network?
October 7, 201213 yr I use XBMC and prior to using unRaid I was playing back from external hard drives over usb 2 with no issues. XBMC on what hardware...? Could make a huge difference to the likely performance.
October 7, 201213 yr If you can't tell the difference between crappy recodes and original Blu-ray, either: 1) You have a crap TV 2) Your TV was never calibrated 3) Your eyes are broken 3 is the most common. 1) Not a crap tv; top of the line Samsun 55 inch 8000 from 2 years ago. 2) Was calibrated though not professionally 3) My eyes are just fine. Like I said I can notice a difference it is just such a small diffence that I can't justify having a huge file size or having multiple encodes just to play on my mobile devices. If you are getting crap reencodes you should tweak you encode setting. A very good 1080p encode can be achieved 8 to10 GB. Changing the x264 advanced options in handbrake such as reference and b-frames and also bumping the bit rate will produce an excellent video. Though doing so will make your encode take very long probably close to a day. Playback of these files will also be very CPU intensive compared to other x264 encodes.
October 8, 201213 yr Author Thanks for all your replies. The issue is not a video encoding problem. I am using a Mac Mini with XBMC. The unit is used only for video playback. The issue here is that prior to my unRaid build, believe it or not, I had 8 2TB hard drives running off USB directly into the Mac. I never experienced a single problem. When ever an action scene occurs so that the movie pans quickly, I get a distorted stripe through the middle of the screen. It is not occurring over the whole image. The audio is fine. The distortion lasts about a second and then seems to recover until the next action scene. I am wondering if maybe it is the HDMI cable. Does anyone know whether these cables can degrade or fail in a sense? I am attaching a syslog which I hope might help. syslog-2012-10-07.txt.zip
October 8, 201213 yr Given that you aren't doing realtime re-encoding, this sounds to me like a bandwidth issue. Looking at your disks I see they're recent disks (Seagate SATA3 + WD EARS) so I don't expect problems there. Can you tell us about how your XBMC frontend chats to the Unraid backend?
October 8, 201213 yr If you can't tell the difference between crappy recodes and original Blu-ray, either: 1) You have a crap TV 2) Your TV was never calibrated 3) Your eyes are broken 3 is the most common. 1) Not a crap tv; top of the line Samsun 55 inch 8000 from 2 years ago. 2) Was calibrated though not professionally 3) My eyes are just fine. Like I said I can notice a difference it is just such a small diffence that I can't justify having a huge file size or having multiple encodes just to play on my mobile devices. If you are getting crap reencodes you should tweak you encode setting. A very good 1080p encode can be achieved 8 to10 GB. Changing the x264 advanced options in handbrake such as reference and b-frames and also bumping the bit rate will produce an excellent video. Though doing so will make your encode take very long probably close to a day. Playback of these files will also be very CPU intensive compared to other x264 encodes. or 4) You are sitting too far from the screen (max is 2x screen width) 5) You "can't see HD" this is really common. Many people "can't see the difference" between SD and HD. I watch untouched Blu-rays on my 110" screen, but I can easily see compression artefacts in recodes on my laptop's LED backlit 16.4" display. People who say there "is no difference" are mistaken. If there was no difference, every HD movie would be delivered on a DVD9 and not a BD-50.
October 8, 201213 yr If you can't tell the difference between crappy recodes and original Blu-ray, either: 1) You have a crap TV 2) Your TV was never calibrated 3) Your eyes are broken 3 is the most common. 1) Not a crap tv; top of the line Samsun 55 inch 8000 from 2 years ago. 2) Was calibrated though not professionally 3) My eyes are just fine. Like I said I can notice a difference it is just such a small diffence that I can't justify having a huge file size or having multiple encodes just to play on my mobile devices. If you are getting crap reencodes you should tweak you encode setting. A very good 1080p encode can be achieved 8 to10 GB. Changing the x264 advanced options in handbrake such as reference and b-frames and also bumping the bit rate will produce an excellent video. Though doing so will make your encode take very long probably close to a day. Playback of these files will also be very CPU intensive compared to other x264 encodes. or 4) You are sitting too far from the screen (max is 2x screen width) 5) You "can't see HD" this is really common. Many people "can't see the difference" between SD and HD. I watch untouched Blu-rays on my 110" screen, but I can easily see compression artefacts in recodes on my laptop's LED backlit 16.4" display. People who say there "is no difference" are mistaken. If there was no difference, every HD movie would be delivered on a DVD9 and not a BD-50. I do Probably sit too far away from my TV so the small amount of quality that I lose in the encode isn't noticeable to me. But Like I say I did do multiple encodes of the same video and tested them against the original from only a few feet away, there is some quality loss on my <8 GB rips but not much. When I get my 125" projector I may change my mind about my encodes but that's why I keep the original blu-rays. Even with my 55" I'll throw the blu-ray in every now and again so I can have the 7.1 audio but that's only when I have a hours to sit back, relax and turn up the sound. Some times there is a perceived better quality when using to the watcher even though that watcher can't tell the difference (but really there is a difference in quality no matter how small the difference is). Just by knowing that the original is the best quality possible they will think that a smaller compressed video will just be "crappy" in comparison. What I have been trying to put out there is, there may not be a need to have such a large file size and waist data space. You may think that you can tell the difference between the two files just because the larger file is supposed to be better. Take some time play around with different encode setting, you may find a setting that makes you happy and you can have many more movies on you server before upgrading hard drives. Now if you have one of those 20 some + drive servers with what seems limitless space encoding your videos may not be for you but people like my only have 8 drive systems have very limited space witch has to be shared with backups of home videos, pictures and other miscellaneous data that I don't want to lose.
October 9, 201213 yr I am running xbmc on a 2010 aluminum mini. I have zero issues with HD playback when unraid is the source. I am running eden (11.0) on Snow Leopard (my only non ML mac). i have render method = auto hardware acceleration (VDADencoder) = on adjust display refresh = off I am using SMB not AFP. as I said no playback issues at all... OK, I lied, I do have occasional buffering if I am rebuilding the array or checking parity and the mover kicks off... thats just due to servers internal bandwith because of my expander. also, once in a great moon xbmc will just crash. about once a month.. only happens on my mini. not my win7 builds.
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