Does anyone have an use UnRaid to serve movies to an Nvidia Shield? I'm struggling to get my Shield to stream my movies from the server over a gigabit network. I have tried to use the SMB and NFS protocol but I keep buffering and the movie just stops.

 

I have a HTPC a few inches from this and it plays everything perfectly fine. I am using Kodi and playing it directly from the server. Any help is appreciated. I've been trying to figure this out and have it narrowed down to a network/server issue.

Ironically, mine is arriving today. I have been on the fence with getting one purely for 4k support. The CyberMonday deal was perfect and couldn't pass it up.

 

I will be setting mine up this weekend and will keep an eye out for any issues or quirks I find and resolve.

 

 

Good luck!

That sounds great! I'm sure you will like it. It is a really great piece of hardware. I just wished I wasn't running into this issue with it and my server. The same movie I played from anotehr computer on the same network and it played flawless so it is definitely an UnRAID issue. I wish you luck and keep me posted please. I hope you get better results then I have 

I've been using one for quite some time now and do not have the issues you're experiencing.

 

I'm also using Kodi, with a shared MariaDB library exclusively with SMB.

 

I don't have any stuttering issues, the only issue I had (now fixed) was that a movie would stop for no good reason somewhere in the middle/towards the end. I could just hit play/resume and it would then be fine. That issue seems to have been fixed by an update from Nvidia or Kodi.

 

What type of bitrate are your movies?

I've never attempted uncompressed (but have material that I could).

Most of my media is 1080P 8-15GB per movie.

 

Do you ave Wifi setup? Is it possible it tries to use that instead (you can set default in settings)?

Well I think I fixed it and you won't believe what caused my problems....THE NETWORK CABLE! I rewired everything a few days ago and used a cat6 cable from the server to the switch. I guess it really does a number on performance because I changed it to a cat5 cable and everything worked fine. I didn't think of the cable since my HTPC wasn't having a streaming issue. I guess the Shield struggles to download data from a device that uses a cat6 cable. 

Well I think I fixed it and you won't believe what caused my problems....THE NETWORK CABLE! I rewired everything a few days ago and used a cat6 cable from the server to the switch. I guess it really does a number on performance because I changed it to a cat5 cable and everything worked fine. I didn't think of the cable since my HTPC wasn't having a streaming issue. I guess the Shield struggles to download data from a device that uses a cat6 cable. 

 

Cat6 should have better (theoretical) peformance than cat5, so I'm guessing the cat6 cable was defective or damaged in some way.

 

I had a similar problem (not with a Nvidia Shield since I don't have an Nvidia Shield...) but with unraid in general a while back. Bad cable needed to be swapped, but it took me a while to test that.

 

Now that's the first thing I test when I'm not getting the speeds I expect.

Glad you figured it out!

 

On the topic of Cat6... When I moved into my house last year I wanted the best, and had access to some free Cat6a cabling...

I ran 2 rooms in this cable (and while it is working fine) I wouldn't do it again.

The cable is thick, big, needed different ends as the twisted pair gauge is smaller (=bigger) than Cat5e, the pairs were much tighter wound and difficult to separate, and overall a pain to work with.

 

Considering my network is only 1Gbps, the difference from Cat5e is negligible (minus the things the cable does better like cross-talk, etc...).

 

This of course is more related to bulk cables and cutting/installing your own ends, but still I had no idea.

When 10 Gbps becomes more affordable and is a standard, well then there is a reason for me to upgrade (I'd assume Cat5e wouldn't support that).

I think the cable if fine believe it or not. It just the Nividia Shield that would not play files using that cable. Every computer and laptop had no problems. That is probably a hardware issue that Nvidia needs to work on. Or maybe it's just my box that is faulty. Who knows?!