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From what I read most people having problems with buffering use Macs or other apple gear.
I had buffering issues as well when I added SMB shares by entering Mac's IP address manually.
Instead of doing that, you can try the follwoing:
- on Mac go to Network settings in System Preferences
- Chose your network and go to advanced -> WINS
- Enter a Workgroup name "WORKGROUP" (or whatever you want to use)
- On Apple TV add source and browse to "Windows Network (SMB)". Now the workgroup should show up with the mac name inside. Browse to mac and add shared folders.
For some reason adding folders via this method instead of adding the IP address of the Mac manually solved my buffering issues. I also used to get "Windows Network unavailable" on ATV until I entered a workgroup name in WINS menu on the Mac.
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2011-02-04, 17:57
(This post was last modified: 2011-02-04, 18:00 by chad473.)
I think tonight I'll boot into windows 7 via boot camp and see if there are still smb issues on my imac. I've added my shares in the manner above and there was still buffering. Whether it was less than when I added via IP, I can't say for sure.
All that said, it's only a small amount of files that are giving me issues. They've just been driving me mad because I can share them to several other clients on the network (wired into the router just like the atv2) without issue. So I know it's not a bandwidth issue.
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Maybe I misspoke earlier - but all of my "serving" has been from a Windows 7 computer, using a SMB share connection. I will try the "Workgroup" method this weekend.
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I have a D-Link DNS-323 NAS that I was previously streaming content by way of samba and was frequently seeing a lot of buffering issues; I've since changed it from samba to uPnP and haven't had any issues. In fact, everything in general seems a bit snappier (in regards to loading the list of videos and beginning play of a video).
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Using Win7, SMB, greenpoison jailbreak, recent XBMC, etc etc...
Seeing a LOT of buffering going on. I see people earlier discussing how their movies will stop and buffer once in the beginning of a file, and then intermittently.
I have just been backing up my DVDs and own no HD stuff, so everything I've been trying to play has been 720 mkv, typical handbreak encodes.
My experience so far has been that it stops to "buffer" generally within the first 10-20 seconds, but then continues to do so rather frequently (every 5min or so) for movies, more frequently than others have experienced it seems.
TV Shows are a different beast. A 22min show will do the initial buffer as many before have described, but then the buffering will become more and more frequent as the file progresses, to the point that it becomes unwatchable (buffer for 20seconds... file plays for 10 seconds... buffer again, etc). Again, 720 mkv on these as well.
Out of curiosity, I threw on a couple random xvid avis and such I had randomly and tried those, with extremely similar results: shorter TV files essentially work their way towards "buffering..." unwatchability, and larger movie-length files have been doing so at least every 5minutes or so.
Just thought I'd throw that out there to contribute! I sincerely hope this is something that can be worked on for future releases...
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The ATV2 doesn't have gigabit ethernet because it doesn't need it, as has already been pointed out. Well encoded 1080p video rarely goes over 45Mb/s and the ATV2 wasn't even designed to play that. You've got to bear in mind that this piece of kit was designed with a very specific infrastructure (Internet and local iTunes streaming) in mind, not playing back files off a local SMB file share (not technically streaming).
XBMC tries to read ahead in the file it's playing back and hold that data in memory to smooth playback. Most modern HTPC setups have a minimum of a gig or so of memory to play with; the ATV2 only has 256MB of memory so this approach is obviously not possible. Apple gets smooth playback from iTunes by initially downloading as much of the movie as it can, as fast as it can, to it's 8GB of internal flash storage and then playing back from there. As the movie progresses it grabs more of the movie if needed and, again, stores it locally. This would, I believe, be a pretty big task to integrate into XBMC just for the ATV2 platform.
fwiw, I'm running the following setup and have no buffering issues at all:
ATV2 connected via 802.11n WiFi to...
Airport Extreme base station connected via gigabit ethernet (jumbo frames enabled) to...
A Mac Mini for iTunes Home Sharing and a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (via SMB) for XBMC content
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make sure you click save in ps3ms after adding your shares. try saving and restarting and see if they are there.
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Greetings.. I have had similar issues.. I have 2 ATV's. The first works great (via Ethernet) and SMB. The second, is upstairs and over wireless and doesn't have the best of connection. I have buffering issues every 10-20 seconds. However, if I switch over to UPNP, streaming is fine.
I did notice issues scraping with UPNP though, looks like it parsed the files from my share different than via SMB. Just curious if others have done this, and solved it easily?
I can post some examples here, just need to load up SMB and then drop back over to UPNP...
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What's the difference between ps3mediaserver and mediatomb? Can you add your content to your XBMC library with ps3mediaserver?
