Z9X - SMB playback issues while streaming from NAS

more hints about a buffer problem on Zidoo side in my humble opinion.......I would guess that the prefetch read value is not matching the buffer value (this was a long lasting bug story in VLC Player together with SMB), but as said a wild guess (if the buffers are not matching a re-establisment of the SMB connection will happen from fast to not so fast...)

 

Eventually received the revised firmware yesterday. Unfortunately it doesn't resolve the issue for me using either protocols - SMB/NFS. Sat down to watch "The Great Wall" - mkv rip from the UHD disc, using MakeMKV 1.15.4. last night and only managed to get around 3 minutes in when the picture froze then re-started. As I was watching with my good lady wife and didn't fancy any further interruptions I switched playback to a Vero4K+ and achieved flawless playback. This on the same network and from the same storage device as the attempt made with the Z9X - go figure .

 

@Derek Watson WAF is very important.

 

Haha! With all the crap going on in the news right now, that cheered me right up!

 

I don't have the guts to let my gf read this

 

You think she doesn't already know?

 

This is a media player but I cant watch any movie without freezes from nas.

vs10 engine is in the development process ok but, are you rediscovering samba/nfs?

 

Can some send me the 0.98 firmware?

 

Contact @mirror via Private Message, provide him with the MAC address of your unit and current firmware your running and he'll provide it.

 

Two observations:
1. 400Mbps JF clip stutter is much less after the Z9X is running for a hour or so.
2. 400Mbps JF clip stutter is really horrible immediately after Z9X is rebooted.

I had a bit of time to experiment with Wireshark, found some interesting findings. Check out the filtered Wireshark trace (Excel file).

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gjmOAfPVZ9RxRJ72sZZjRBH20yjWyyKc?usp=sharing

When Z9X is playing the clip, there is a lot of other SMB traffic going on, Z9X seem to be checking out files in other folders/shares.
Is it because Z9X is scanning in the background while Player is playing back?

I'll tidy up the other trace to show that when Z9X is in stable state, the Z9X is just pulling the stream 100%, and not checking out other files/folders.

Thoughts??

 

Indeed interesting, I hope Zidoo will look deeper into this (if backgroud scanning is done at the same time, this may lead to such behavior, but only Zidoo can tell and fix it).

Question open is also if with NFS the same behavior can be reproduced....

Thank you! for that tests

 

I have Automatic updating sources and Automatic scan storage options in HT4 disabled though and I rarely get freezes early on in playback. That might be a different issue with high bitrate files and early content scanning. When I monitor the traffic during times I have freezes it's in the 20 - 50 Mbps range.

 

I face them also with much lower rates like 10-13Mbps

 

I went to HT4 and switch off auto-scanning, then shutdown Z9x.

Power up, then try the 400Mbps JF clip. Wow, no horrible stutter at all, maybe one or two very short hiccups (hardly noticeable). Hey, this could be a workaround...

300Mbps clip, no stutter at all.
Repeated another shutdown/boot/play clip, same results, hardly any stutter...

Can others test this theory?

We may have found the root cause...

Zidoo should suspend all unnecessary background processing once media is playing. Let the player have almost exclusive control over all resources...

 

sorry what is the HT4???

 

Z9X built in poster wall app. Home Theater 4.

 

If the background processing is the root cause, Zidoo should implement a flag to tell all background process to suspend non-critical activities (eg. non-essential SMB/NFS/network traffic) if the Player is active...

 

It may be a silly question...

Unless I'm mistaken you didn't have this problem with the 0.80/85 ?

What happened between 0.85 and 0.90 ? what did Zidoo add or modify between these 2 FW so that this problem appears suddenly ?

It's not as if this problem has been present since several FW or since their availability last summer.

 

I get stuttering even when just using file browser app, and not HT4.

But.... It does seems worse when playing same files with HT4 used...
So we may be onto something.. Background services are killing the buffer or transfer rate for zidoo..

 

Sorry so Home Theater OK, I do not have it initially enabled so still face lags on SMB and NFS though.....