Streaming Issues to WDTV Live - Is the problem 4K (AF) Sectors? Totally confused

[british]

Streaming Issues to WDTV Live - [SOLVED]

Hello All,

I'm hoping someone can help me find out the solution to the following problem. I have a WDTV Live (Gen. 2) connected to my TV which I previously used to watch up to 1080p content on which was served up via CIFS from Ubuntu 11.xx (Ext4 formatted disks). This worked fine and had no issues with frame dropping.

Last week I decided to build a dedicated NAS and opted for FreeNAS 8.0.3 and purchased the following components:

Mother Board: GA-H61M-D2-B3 (Rev. 1.0) (Firmware = F8) http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3773#ov
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K (3,33GHz)
RAM: Kingston DDR3 (2 x 4GB modules)

My router is a Cisco E4200, and the FreeNAS is connected by CAT6 cable to the router.

So, I started out by adding 2 x 2TB HD's WD20EARX-00PASB0 ... these are AF (4096 byte sector) drives, mirrored to give me 1 x 2TB volume.

When I created the volume which I call RAID, I ticked the 4096 sector size, and did not really think anything more about it... and continued to setup my ZFS Datasets.

I then FTP'd my data up to the NAS. I then added to the RAID volume another pair of drives... 2 x ST32000542AS once again which have AF support, and which I ticked as being 4096 sector size and put them in mirror mode.

I setup some CIFS shares, one of which is called "HD" and played a movie on the WDTV Live... it started dropping frames, freezing, starting (but in like a fast forward style, whizzing through, broken audio)... basically totally unwatchable.

So I then tested playing the same movie with VLC on my MacBook Air, over CIFS.... worked fine, no issues (And this was over Wireless N)
The I tried VLC on my Lenovo laptop, running Ubuntu 11.10 and connected via Gigabit to the E4200.... no issues....

I've copied the movie over CIFS to both the Mac and the Lenovo too, copies fast.

I've tested the drives R/W performance directly on the FreeNAS using dd ... no problems.

The only thing I have noticed is that dmesg reports all the drives as having 512 byte sector sizes, and from what I can see they not aligned.

I'm totally lost as to why this is happening, so much so I took a Popcorn Hour A210 connected to the router, and it does exactly the same when playing any 1080p movie... but even worse than the WDTV...

Does anyone have any ideas please? I have tried jumbo frames, no change, tweaked CIFS, no change.... really gutted actually because we are so dependent on the WDTV :-(

Note: I also tried NFS share, and the Popcorn Hour A210 also failed to play properly.

All the best

British

 

[british]

After a few people advised me this could *possibly* be caused by the RealTek 8111E ethernet, I've ordered an Intel Pro1000 PCI-Express and am waiting for it to arrive. Fingers crossed hopefully that is the issue. I will post the results.

 

[british]

One thing I've just noticed is that when playing via the WDTV Live, the memory usage goes near max (8GB), however when playing over the Wireless-N in VLC on the MacBook Pro, it's 2GB and consitant.

Final thought is that the WDTV is 100Mbit connected the Cisco E4200, while the FreeNAS is 1000Mbit connected to the E4200.

 

[british]

I've done two things so far, I've upgrade to FreeNAS-8.0.3-RELEASE-p1-x64 (9591) and that made no difference to the issue.

And just a few minutes ago I put the FreeNAS in 100Mbit mode on the NIC.... NOW finally it seems to be not dropping frames... but leaves me wondering what to do about loosing my gigabit connection :-(

 

[british]

OK I got Intel Pro1000 today, and put it in the FreeNAS box, 10 minutes into streaming still no issues.... assuming I do not return to say anything else, the issue was the onboard RealTek. Hopefully all this info will serve useful to someone.

 

[pk007_za]

I had the same issue with a Marvell 88E8057 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN onboard NIC, would only work in 100Mbps and not Gigabit.

In the end i had to get an Intel Pro1000/T as well, which solved all my issues. For me, the problem was the lack of proper msk() Driver support in the underlying FreeBSD.

Pk

 

[british]

I had the same issue with a Marvell 88E8057 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN onboard NIC, would only work in 100Mbps and not Gigabit.

In the end i had to get an Intel Pro1000/T as well, which solved all my issues. For me, the problem was the lack of proper msk() Driver support in the underlying FreeBSD.

Pk

You had the same problem with the WDTV specifically or another device?

 

[pk007_za]

I had the same issues on the following connected devices:

WDTV Live.
Custom DC Atom 1.6Ghz XBMC HTPC.
PC, just accessing FreeNAS Webadmin over gigabit.

basically everwhere, there was about 80% packet loss to the FreeNAS device when using gigabit.

pk

 

[british]

I had the same issues on the following connected devices:

WDTV Live.
Custom DC Atom 1.6Ghz XBMC HTPC.
PC, just accessing FreeNAS Webadmin over gigabit.

basically everwhere, there was about 80% packet loss to the FreeNAS device when using gigabit.

pk

Thanks for the info pk... I'm sure some people will find this info useful... In my search for the solution I read up various peoples takes on the problem, and I am guessing but I think people have similar issues with other NAS equipement.

 

[pk007_za]

There is a fix for the Marvell Controller here:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=155636

Can a FreeNAS Admin confirm that the current release version tracks these changes ?

 

[William Grzybowski]

You can add a request to add those patches to freenas, support.freenas.org