Cause of buffering with 4K

[wakeboarder141 40]

Anything from outside my home network is not able to stream my 4K movies without constant buffering.  They work fine on my Kodi boxes locally, but not remotely.  I am trying to figure out how to diagnose if this is a problem with bandwidth, CPU, settings, etc.  Smaller, lower resolution 1080P stuff works fine, but the large UHD 4K HDR Atmos movies buffer every 5 seconds or so, and are unplayable.  Hopefully someone can help me narrow down where the limitation might lie to see if there is anything I can do to improve it.  All of my files are streaming from my Synology 1019+ NAS over a 400/30mb connection.  I do notice that when it is transcoding, the CPU usage on the NAS will be at 100% so I''m not sure if that is the whole issue or not.

[rechigo 364]

These are the things I looked for back when I had a terrible server (some 2009 mac mini, didn't even support hw transcoding so I was forced to move)

 

1) What's the bitrate of the file you're trying to play? If it's above 30mbps (your upload bandwidth), you're not going to have enough bandwidth and the video will buffer, so you'll need to transcode

 

2) Check the "stats for nerds" option to see if you're transcoding. What FPS is the transcode running at? Is the FPS lower than the FPS of the media you're playing (most films have an FPS of about 24 FPS, if your transcode FPS is below 24 FPS you're going to have some stuttering 

 

3) After taking a quick glance at google, it looks like your CPU supports hardware transcoding/acceleration, have you tried that out? Your NAS has a Celeron J3455 which has a passmark score of 2,000. A 40 MBps HEVC 4k file requires around a ~12000 passmark score, which obviously isn't going to be watchable. You might be able to squeeze out a 4k transcode w/ hardware accel depending on the bitrate of your file

 

Hope this helps

[wakeboarder141 40]

These are the things I looked for back when I had a terrible server (some 2009 mac mini, didn't even support hw transcoding so I was forced to move)

 

1) What's the bitrate of the file you're trying to play? If it's above 30mbps (your upload bandwidth), you're not going to have enough bandwidth and the video will buffer, so you'll need to transcode

Many of the bitrates are well above 30mb so if my bandwidth needs to be higher than that number, that makes it pretty easy to determine those are never going to stream properly.  I was going to convert them down to 1080P, but I have found on devices that don't support HDR, the movies look terrible so I will most likely have to do something different.  Thanks for your help.

[rechigo 364]

Many of the bitrates are well above 30mb so if my bandwidth needs to be higher than that number, that makes it pretty easy to determine those are never going to stream properly. I was going to convert them down to 1080P, but I have found on devices that don't support HDR, the movies look terrible so I will most likely have to do something different. Thanks for your help.

Yeah, that's a downside with HDR videos. If you want to, it's possible to tonemap the videos using ffmpeg so the colors don't look all washed out

 

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[Luke 42083]

Hi there @@wakeboarder141 can we please look at an example? Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks !