I'm on 1Gbps, and i'm experiencing some stuttering during Blu-ray playback. I've googled around and found other people are experiencing the same thing, and they blame it on unRAID.  This is not an FPS issue. The movie will be playing fine, and then it will just stop playing for a good 30 seconds, then it will stutter along until it catches up. Only happens once every 3-4 hours. I've set Read-Ahead to 2048 in an effort to fix it, and I also upgraded to 4gigs of ram because it was getting used up pretty fast. I'm able to play three blu-rays at the same time, so it's definitely not a performance issue.

 

Network Utilization: <5%

Read: 90MB/s - 95MB/s on all drives.

Software: PowerDVD 9, Windows 7 64-bit

No errors in syslog

This coudl be the drive groups/pairs(?) spinning up issue. Which version of unraid are your using?

4.5.1, I have spinup groups set to disabled, as I never use them.

 

All my hard drives spin up/down individually. Next time it happens, i'll check to see if a hard drive spun up. No one else is accessing the server, or any other file than the one i'm watching.

Looking in a crystal ball.... that blu-ray movie is playing off a user share, right?

 

4.5.1, I have spinup groups set to disabled, as I never use them.

The question is, are all your disks in unique disk controller groups?

 

If they are, it does not matter if you enable or disable the spinup groups, as they are not going to have any effect.  If they are not in distinct spinup groups, then when a second disk spins up, it may cause the output on the associated disk to briefly pause.  (You've disabled the feature that would prevent the pause in output)

All my hard drives spin up/down individually. Next time it happens, i'll check to see if a hard drive spun up. No one else is accessing the server, or any other file than the one i'm watching.

You may not be accessing another disk, but do you have cache_dirs or something like it installed? Or, is your windows PC doing a scan of the media folders to look for additional entries?  (Do you have a share mapped on a PC)

 

Either process might need to reference a disk block that must be read from the physical disk, since your buffer cache has now been filled/re-allocated with the movies you are watching, and any older buffering of the disk directory data overwritten in the buffer.   

 

As far as 2048k buffer read-ahead... I can't see it having to affect anything...  And adding 4Gig of memory because unRAID was using it fast... you are mis-informed on how Linux uses memory.  It is designed to use ALL of whatever it has available.  It will buffer anything read or written to the disks, it will do this until nearly all the available memory is used.  When a new block of data, not in the buffer is needed from a disk, it will free up the oldest referenced memory and read the physical disk populating that oldest buffered data.  It will always free the least-recently-referenced buffer data and reuse it.  If a single Blue-Ray disk is over 4Gig in size you can be assured that when playing it you will use every bit of your RAM buffer available, and 99% of it in the buffer memory will never be referenced a second time unless you skip back and re-watch chapters.

 

Joe L.

Looking in a crystal ball.... that blu-ray movie is playing off a user share, right?

 

 

Yes it is.

I am using user shares and playing my movies thru MainLobby and the Popcorn Hour C200 with no issues at all.

 

You per chance are not using MM3?  If you are, make sure that you do not have the Monitoring Folders turned on.  If you do, you should turn this feature off because that was causing my system to studder.

You per chance are not using MM3?  If you are, make sure that you do not have the Monitoring Folders turned on.  If you do, you should turn this feature off because that was causing my system to studder.

 

Don't know what MM3 is, so most likely not.

I am using user shares and playing my movies thru MainLobby and the Popcorn Hour C200 with no issues at all.

 

Of course you are using user shares and playing your movies with no issues at all.

If user shares weren't working they wouldn't be in the stable release.  But that's not my point.

 

User shares add a signifficant overhead on your server.  That is a medical fact.

So a combination of a not-too-powerful server, and blu-ray playback, and user shares, these three together can give you some grief.

And since the guy didn't mention anything about his hardware, I had to look into my crystal ball.

 

Purko

 

 

I am using user shares and playing my movies thru MainLobby and the Popcorn Hour C200 with no issues at all.

 

Of course you are using user shares and playing your movies with no issues at all.

If user shares weren't working they wouldn't be in the stable release.  But that's not my point.

 

User shares add a signifficant overhead on your server.  That is a medical fact.

So a combination of a not-too-powerful server, and blu-ray playback, and user shares, these three together can give you some grief.

And since the guy didn't mention anything about his hardware, I had to look into my crystal ball.

 

Purko

 

 

 

I didn't mention anything about my hardware because it is in my signature. My server can handle blu-ray playback with no problems but it shouldn't need to because all it is doing is sending the data to my other computer over the network. The computer I am streaming to is a gaming computer that I just built last month, it has the best GPU and CPU on the market. So performance is definitely not the issue,  my CPU and GPU usage is almost nothing. All I can think of is that something is accessing my server and randomly spinning up a drive, which I can test when the issue happens again. I've watched 3 movies and it hasn't happened again though... so no idea.

 

unRAID 4.5.1, Supermicro X7SBE, 2x Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8, Intel E5200, 4GB G.Skill DDR2 800, Norco 4020, 8x WD15EADS, 2GB Lexar Firefly

unRAID 4.5.1, Supermicro X7SBE, 2x Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8, Intel E5200, 4GB G.Skill DDR2 800, Norco 4020, 8x WD15EADS, 2GB Lexar Firefly

 

I see.  Well, that's pretty decent!  You shouldn't be having any problems with Blu-ray.

 

I have to ask this question though...

Have you ever had such problem when playing those same  Blu-rays off of a disk share?

 

 

unRAID 4.5.1, Supermicro X7SBE, 2x Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8, Intel E5200, 4GB G.Skill DDR2 800, Norco 4020, 8x WD15EADS, 2GB Lexar Firefly

 

I see.  Well, that's pretty decent!  You shouldn't be having any problems with Blu-ray.

 

I have to ask this question though...

Have you ever had such problem when playing those same  Blu-rays off of a disk share?

 

 

 

I've never tried. I have my user shares as a mapped drive in windows, so I just go to My Computer and then click on "Movies and TV Shows" and all my files are right there.

 

If it happens again, i'll check to see if a disc spinned up. If there's no sign of that, then i'll try watching my movies from the disc shares for awhile and see if it still happens. It hasn't happened in 2 days now, and i'm starting to think it was PowerDVD 9, as thats the exact same day I updated it to the new version. Nothing about it in the patch notes (figures ).

I had issues with stability and stuttering with PDVD 9 as well and went back to my PDVD8 with no problems.  I use user shares on my unRaid and I stream BD's with no problem with a Sempron 140, 2GB ram on my Gigabyte 785 board. 

It's definitely caused by other drives spinning up. It happened again while playing an ISO from disk5... I noticed disk4 spun up at the time of the slow down. Every on disk4 is just ISOs that were not being accessed.

 

What could cause this? Why would drives randomly spin up when the files aren't being accessed?

Have you tried turning off the Indexer service in Windows? What happens if you browse the share using UNC names (\\sharename\foldername) rather than through a mapped drive?

 

Could it be that Windows Indexing Service is deciding to index the contents of the shared drive while you're watching a movie?

Have you tried turning off the Indexer service in Windows? What happens if you browse the share using UNC names (\\sharename\foldername) rather than through a mapped drive?

 

Could it be that Windows Indexing Service is deciding to index the contents of the shared drive while you're watching a movie?

Or, if you have cache_dirs running it is constantly scanning the directories... If a directory entry on the other disk happens to be re-allocated, and re-used for your playing of your movie, because the old directory entry ended up as the least recently used in the disk buffer, then the disk will spin up so it can be gotten once more from the physical disk.

Have you tried turning off the Indexer service in Windows? What happens if you browse the share using UNC names (\\sharename\foldername) rather than through a mapped drive?

 

Could it be that Windows Indexing Service is deciding to index the contents of the shared drive while you're watching a movie?

 

Indexing Service is turned off because I have SSDs on my main computer. No need to index when you have 0ms access time.

 

Have you tried turning off the Indexer service in Windows? What happens if you browse the share using UNC names (\\sharename\foldername) rather than through a mapped drive?

 

Could it be that Windows Indexing Service is deciding to index the contents of the shared drive while you're watching a movie?

Or, if you have cache_dirs running it is constantly scanning the directories... If a directory entry on the other disk happens to be re-allocated, and re-used for your playing of your movie, because the old directory entry ended up as the least recently used in the disk buffer, then the disk will spin up so it can be gotten once more from the physical disk.

 

Hmm.. I do have cache_dirs running, but this was happening before I even got the app. I really have no clue what it could be.. it always seems like it the drive under the disk i'm playing from. (If I play off disk5, it'll spinup disk4 and 5, etc). I have spinup groups disabled. It's random so it's hard to test.