I have a 1-gig wired network, and my video file server uses SSD drives, so I should have no major worries about network or drive delays. I can transfer files between computers and servers WAY faster than the speed needed for real-time playback. Yet quite often, when I start a video playing on either of my two Z10 Pros, the first second or two of playback sputters until, apparently, enough video has been streamed to fill a small playback buffer. I guess some people value absolutely instant start-up, but for myself, I'd much, MUCH rather have a second or two (or three) of delay after I hit Play for a small buffer to be filled before playback starts. Just show me a spinner or something immediately so I know a button press has registered. Usually playback is smooth sailing after a rough start, but now and then I still get a little stutter or glitch in the middle of a show. Whenever I have bothered to look further into these glitches (which isn't too often, since I just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show -- and especially since I don't want to annoy my wife by interrupting the show) by backing up and playing over a part that glitched, the glitch goes away, indicating that there's no fault in the source material. This leaves momentary network delays as the only likely causes. Once playback starts, I'd like to more effort to be made to buffer even more than a second or two video, so that nothing but a major network fault will ever mess up video playback. Maybe 5 seconds? Maybe 10? For those who demand instant start-up, any initial buffering delay could be optional. I think everyone would benefit from more buffering after start-up.
I'm pretty certain this isn't the Zidoo. I have 3 NAS drives with 4K content. Two are Western Digital MyClouds and one is a MyCloud EX2. I have a gigabit network and the journey from NAS drives to my Z9X Pro test player is through 4 Netgear switches using Cat5. The journey from the NAS drives to my Z9X cinema player is through 2 switches, and again Cat5 only. All NAS drives are set to sleep when not being used - not sure what the time out is, probably around 10s. If I play any file on either player from the two standard MyClouds, if they are awake, playback starts immediately. If they are asleep, it takes maybe 7s or so before playback starts as the drive wakes up. In both cases, playback starts cleanly and there is no glitch and never has been. Believe me, if there was, it wouldn't be living in my cinema! However, the MyCloud EX2 is different - if playback is started when the drive is asleep, again you get the few seconds delay while it wakes, playback starts ok but then a few seconds in the image freezes for a few seconds and then resumes - you just get the one glitch, every time, when the drive wakes. Other EX2 users have confirmed the same behaviour. If the drive is already awake you get no such glitch and playback starts and continues as with the standard MyClouds. (The way I get around the EX2 glitch is to wake the drives up in the Room On macro from my control system)
My network is similar to yours, but I'm using SSDs which never sleep in an Unraid array. Unraid -> Switch -> Router -> Switch -> Living room Zidoo Z10 Pro, for one case. (I'm in a new house, waiting for my new home theater to be built. The "theater" Zidoo is in the bedroom now, not used very often.) I get no glitches if I, say, starting playing a video using VLC from any of the computers in the house, even over wifi. As I mentioned in another post, I've been creating my own streaming video server, which works by converting all of my MKV files into multiple VP9/Vorbis .webm files for adaptive DASH streaming (and a fallback non-adaptive .mp4 file at 360p). I can play those videos from my collection on my phone, Unraid -> Switch -> Router -> WAN/ISP -> 5G cellular network -> phone, and not see any glitches. Given that, I have a hard time imagining how this problem could be anything but my Zidoo. The symptoms seem exactly like what I'd expect if there isn't enough buffering. Maybe there's a Zidoo configuration issue? (Not that I see anything obvious in the setting I could change.)
I think we need to call on someone using Unraid ( @Sledgehamma ?) as I've never used it but have seen loads of issues with Zidoo and Unraid - just not this one. If this particular issue was an intrinsic problem with the Zidoo we'd have seen a lot of noise about it.
Not sure what is causing the issue here. Are you streaming via SMB or NFS? In the Zidoo you can enable a pause after playback starts because of the HDMI handshake that takes places. Have you tried increasing that pause? Your video server is an array exclusively with SSDs? I dont think its the buffer. When I pause a video and my unRaid server puts the HDD into sleep for inactivity, I can still watch for several seconds until it stops and the HDD is waken up.
The problem does now look more like an HDMI handshake issue as you've suggested (at least the persistent initial start-up glitches) rather than buffering. (The much more rare, and relatively mild, mid-show glitches would need another explanation.) To answer your first question, I'm streaming via SMB, but I don't think that matters now. I had my Zidoo's "Playback/Auto frame rate/Frame rate mode" setting as "Match frame rate and resolution". When I set that to "off", the start-up problem goes away. Leaving it as "Match frame rate and resolution", my previous 1 second pause wasn't enough to help, but upping that to 3 seconds didn't help either. I haven't tried higher than 3 seconds, but since I've never seen a glitch last more than a fraction of a second, exploring larger pauses didn't seem worthwhile. What I don't like about setting "Match frame rate and resolution" to "off", however, is that 1080p content ends up being converted to 4K by the Zidoo, before being sent to my TV. I'd rather let my TV do that conversion, however, because it has better upscaling. I can force Zidoo output to 1080p, but then I'd have to remember to change that setting any time I played 4K content. Once "Match frame rate and resolution" was set to "off", my "Display/Resolution" settings didn't seem to matter much. The start-up glitches were fixed no matter what I changed under "Resolution", with the only effect being where upscaling was performed. So now I'm left wondering how to get rid of the glitches, but keep taking advantage of my TV's better upscaling.
Have you tested comparing SMB/NFS playback with a local copy on a USB disk? I suspect your issue is more related to the way your TV / receiver handles refresh rate changes and the occasionally problematic handshaking that has to take place every time. I also use Unraid and have it set up to keep the last ~30 days of added content on SSD cache before it gets moved to the HDD array, which is set to spin down when at idle, so playback of old files off the HDD take a few extra seconds to start as I have to wait for spinup, but recent additions start within a couple of seconds over NFS from the SSDs. My network is Unraid - 10gbe - switch - 1gbe to z2600. Unraid has a big 10gbe pipe as I have 4-5 clients hitting it at gigabit and 2.5gb rates pretty often, but they have never gotten in the way of network media playback on my multiple Nividia shields. I am looking into scripting a way to have recent media copied to a local disk on my Z2600 to further reduce delays/network issues, but that is going to be limited by the software on the Zidoo side of things unless a similar disk caching feature was added by the developers, similar to how players like Kaleidescape work, except from your own server source.
