Tikuf 663 Posted October 30, 2013 Share Posted October 30, 2013 It may well be that your pc cannot keep up with the transcode to whatever format the browser needs. I will need ffmpeg & server logs and browser details before I can even look at what may be causing the issue. Please read http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/739-how-to-report-a-problem/ http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/1209-getting-useful-logs-media-info/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37260 Posted October 30, 2013 Share Posted October 30, 2013 The + options are higher bitrates than the regular ones. You might also want to post specifications of your server. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyFr79 228 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 sounds like your cpu is choking on transcoding, remember it's have to decode the 1080p file and then re-encode all in CPU so if your CPU isn't to task it will choke. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sfnetwork 514 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 (edited) The + options are higher bitrates than the regular ones. You might also want to post specifications of your server. I think you already answered that but I just can't find it... 1080+ higher bitrate.... How much exactly? (same question for 720+) Web client is the only one that isn't specific with this information... Edited October 31, 2013 by sfnetwork Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 I have been doing a lot of testing on my MB setup over the past few days and I have noticed at some times when I am playing content via the web client I will see some minor stuttering on certain videos. Today I have been working on trying to pinpoint what is causing this stuttering As I was trying to reproduce it I noticed that by default the videos appear to be streaming in 720p+ instead of their native resolution which typically is 1080p for most of my movie video files. I started messing with this setting a little bit to see if it would have any effect. During this particular testing instance, I noticed that the file would play fine at 720p, 720p+, and 1080p; but when I would move it to 1080p+ it would start pausing the video occasionally. Can someone help explain what are these + notations for the resolution options? Is it trying to upscale the video somehow beyond the 1080p content within the file? Why would it be stuttering when I switch to this resolution? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyFr79 228 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 I should ad, to check if it's your cpu, start playing something, log into your server, rightclick the taskbar and select "task manager" click the performance tab and see what the cpu activity is at, if it's constantly pegged at 100% then your cpu is the issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 (edited) I noticed some stuttering when playing Trailers sometimes in MBC as well and the first thing I thought was that it might be a CPU issue. Hardware is a Cisco UCS C210 Server with two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 2.66Ghz CPUs, 72GB of RAM, sixteen 10K 287GB HDDs in a RAID6 configuration on a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9261 controller. On this I have ESX 5.5 installed with a VM of Win 2012 R2 running Media Browser Server. Right now I have four vCPUs and 8GB of RAM dedicated to this VM. in vSphere performance stats I really don't see any CPU spikes around the time I was doing this testing. The host is connected to a Cisco 3560X Gigabit switch with 6 links in a Port Channel. My NAS where the files are located is a Synology RS10613xs with ten 4TB 7200 RPM HDDs and two 240GB SSDs for read cache. It is connected via four Gigabit links to the same switch. The client where I was doing the testing from is also connected to this switch. I will do a bit more testing tomorrow with Windows performance monitor open and report back. I was a little lazy today and was just looking at the vSphere performance stats but I suppose there could be smaller spikes not reflected in that reporting that I will see in Windows directly. I can also allocate more cores and/or RAM to it if there appears to be any contention. Thanks for all the responses. Edited October 31, 2013 by moviefan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tikuf 663 Posted October 31, 2013 Author Share Posted October 31, 2013 Logs please. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14959 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 What kind of trailers? If they are current trailers from the plug-in then they are streaming from the web. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 What kind of trailers? If they are current trailers from the plug-in then they are streaming from the web. The trailers I was referring to were current ones from the plugin yes. I was under the impression that with MBS3 trailers were downloaded locally to the MBS system and then streamed from there via the clients...no? In any case, I think the trailers streaming issue I am going to chalk up to oddities with my main HTPC. I have a core i5 660 that I have witnessed bizarre behavior on for some time now and I think I am just going to give up and get a new motherboard and CPU for it because I'm sick of dealing with the issues. I was watching the same trailers that were stuttering and taking forever to load on my HTPC on my laptop connected via WiFi last night and they worked fine. The testing I was doing with resolutions and 1080p+ though I have been doing from my main desktop system which is an Intel Core i7 920 with a GTX 570 HD GPU and plays everything else fine so I think this is related to something else. I was running the same tests today with Windows performance monitor open on the server this morning and it seems like the CPU stays right under 50% utilization the whole time. I also increased the vCPU allocation from four to six just in case that would help at all but I still see the brief pauses every once in a while. I will collect logs and post them a bit later today. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 The trailers from the plug-in are all streamed directly from Apple. They do not download. I see. It used to be an option in MB2 to download the trailers locally so they would play a bit better. Any possibility of implementing that in MB3 on the server side? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted October 31, 2013 Share Posted October 31, 2013 (edited) Here are some logs. I followed instructions, turned on advanced logs, deleted logs in directory, started playing from client a movie and changed to 1080p+. CPU stayed under 50%. Played for about a minute and the video stuttered 5 or 6 times at least. Edited November 1, 2013 by moviefan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tikuf 663 Posted November 1, 2013 Author Share Posted November 1, 2013 Of those videos the only one you would have seen stutter on (according to the logs ) would be American History X [1998] ® [1080p].mkv because it was not converting fast enough this may be due to your network or the fact you are running in a vm (we only use two threads for converting) . If you hit pause for a short time the stutter should go away (i know its not a good solution but if you could test it that would be great) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14959 Posted November 1, 2013 Share Posted November 1, 2013 The trailers from the plug-in are all streamed directly from Apple. They do not download. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted November 1, 2013 Share Posted November 1, 2013 Yes it seems like pausing the films that exhibit this behavior causes it to improve from some brief testing. Will MBS always be limited to two threads? Can you just put a pause before playing if it is needed to buffer additional data? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tikuf 663 Posted November 1, 2013 Author Share Posted November 1, 2013 Webm is the only one limited to 2 threads it is not properly multithreaded and enabling 3 or 4 threads is actually slower than the 2. h264 on the other hand is properly multithreaded. In theory the only place you will see this is the dashboard (providing there isnt something else at play here). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghostm 74 Posted November 1, 2013 Share Posted November 1, 2013 (edited) Yes it seems like pausing the films that exhibit this behavior causes it to improve from some brief testing. Will MBS always be limited to two threads? Can you just put a pause before playing if it is needed to buffer additional data? Thanks! I am getting some occasional stuttering to playing files in chrome, I dont really do much transcoding since its outside my realm, my pc usage is around 75% doing it, alot of my files are bluray 1:1 mkv rips, but its not bad. Im just curious about what he asked about and would like to add to it as well. Could you implement an auto pause until the file is ready to play? Or a buffering icon and then pause the video until it can play through fully without stuttering? Or will that not help the issue? My wife for instance tried to play a file and complained about the odd stutter, for someone like her who knows next to nothing and for smooth playback an auto pause or buffering option until the file can play smoothly would be nice. I should mention after i manually pause it seems to work quite well. Edited November 1, 2013 by Ghostm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tikuf 663 Posted November 1, 2013 Author Share Posted November 1, 2013 @@Ghostm it all comes down to horse power generally dropping the quality down a notch will solve the issue (not always). But doing metrics for every single cpu is a very big undertaking an probably not something we will do in the near future. have a look at your ffmpeg logs and look for the part of the log that says fps if it us under the actual frame rate of the video it means your cpu is not quite capable of decoding and encoding the video in 2 threads. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghostm 74 Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 (edited) Thanks for your help, your probably right, im not sure how to quite read these logs for example. frame= 82 fps= 22 q=0.0 size= 891kB time=00:00:03.58 bitrate=2038.3kbits/s But since pausing it and giving it some to work seems to solve this problem would the auto pause idea work? I know from using a few other devices streaming on the network it will basically auto pause or queue the file up and a buffer message is displayed until it can play through stutter free, or at least thats what appears to be happening on some other software i have used. I am just thinking of an idea for the end user to make playback smoother for them. Would such an idea work or help the end user experience, when i pause the file and give it a few minutes to transcode then it plays back fine. Maybe you addressed this in your post i am a simple end user so I might not fully understand this in terms you do. Is that what you mean when discussing doing metrics? Edited November 2, 2013 by Ghostm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tikuf 663 Posted November 2, 2013 Author Share Posted November 2, 2013 fps= 22 is the one to look for it means it is converting at 22 frames per second if the video is 23.976 it is converting a tad slow we may look at some sort of buffering soon. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 fps= 22 is the one to look for it means it is converting at 22 frames per second if the video is 23.976 it is converting a tad slow we may look at some sort of buffering soon. I would say that if the streaming process only uses two threads, and apparently can easily overload these two threads in converting one stream, that it is something that should be addressed eventually. If two people are streaming can the second streaming process utilize different cores or will it always be restricted to two no matter how many conversion streams are being requested? When I first read about MB3 I was really excited about the possibility of multiple people accessing my files from whatever device they are on but if the server can really only handle transcoding of one client concurrently using all of the resources it's allowed to use then it seems like there could be some scaling issues when extending to multiple other devices simultaneously. Since dual core CPU isn't enough, and it supposedly doesn't get better with more than two cores, would leveraging GPUs be better? Maybe this is a possibility for installations where the user would like to handle more transcoding? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37260 Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 the two thread limitation only applies to chrome, firefox, and select android devices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 Okay so it doesn't apply to IE? Any other browsers I should be looking at? Safari? Opera? It doesn't apply to the IOS mobile app? Doesn't really seem like the program works very well at all in IE. First video I tried playing it said "Invalid Source" and then it stopped displaying all of my metadata properly. Switched to Firefox, which I realize in on your list up there, and then it played fine but the position bar doesnt seem to work at all for controlling the location of the movie. Chrome works the best so far of the main three, and that is the one where I have seen the stuttering so far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37260 Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 Actually it also applies to IE. In IE you get a message asking you to install the google webm plugin for video playback. I'm assuming you either ignored that, or you're on windows phone or RT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted November 2, 2013 Share Posted November 2, 2013 I am using IE on a computer and just didnt notice the request to install the first time. I did now this second time and even after installing the WebM plugin I just see this message when trying to play within IE: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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