4K Playback always Buffering on Shield, 10 Gbit Connection....Why?

General Discussions
1

hello professionals

I’m desperate, I’ve been trying for weeks to get a 4K stream running at my friends, without success so far.
I have tried every tip I found in the forum, but it keeps going wrong with my friends. At my place with the same hardware it works great.

I have installed the latest server and have a 10 Gbit fiber optic connection. They all have the new Nvidia Shield 2019 Pro in use and 2 of them even have a Dolby Atmos compatible AV receiver between Shield and TV. Nevertheless, you still have every 10 seconds dropouts. All have 1 Gbit connections and reach 900 Mbit in Speedtests in the download.
My upload is even on strong days with 20 1080p streams not even 10% busy and would have space for these 4K streams without end.
Why does that not work? Why can’t I set a bigger buffer? We already tried to use external HDD’s on the shield as memory expansion but it doesn’t work at all.
I would be really happy if someone could tell me what the problem is. It also plays all Direct Play. Nothing is transcoded, no picture, no sound, no subtitles, really all Direct Play. The server has space without end, but the user still gets a jerk.

The exact same hardware at my home locally plays everything without jerking. So it is definitely because they are remote users. But all hardware and the lines are free and have more than enough power. It’s really desperate.

I still suspect the problem that the buffer size is too small. Is there really nothing you can do to increase it? The programmers must know that this is not enough for Remux streams if you are not local?

Please help me, I would like to be able to use this. For months we have been trying around and bought all new hardware which was recommended in the forum.

2

Just want to clarify some things…

  1. Your friend is also using the Shield Pro 2019?
  2. Your friends internet is the one with 900Mbit download?
  3. You confirmed during playback that the server was not transcoding (like visually checked the server dashboard)?
  4. How is your friends shield hooked up? Ethernet? Wifi?

Also, I am on a 1Gbit connection here (Kansas City), and I remotely stream 4K to Orlando, FL, Lisbon Falls, ME, Denver, CO, and Tilburg, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands. So buffer size is not really the problem I wouldn’t expect. Since theoretically it’s the same for all of us.

3

Just want to clarify some things…

Your friend is also using the Shield Pro 2019?

Yeah, everybody bought a new shield too.

Your friends internet is the one with 900Mbit download?

Exactly, I have 10 Gbit fiber, you all have fiber too but only 1 Gbit, but each speedtest indicates 900-940 Mbit in the download.

You confirmed during playback that the server was not transcoding (like visually checked the server dashboard)?

Yes the server does not transcode anything, everything is checked with Tautulli Live on the server, several times. In the beginning this was a problem with Atmos movies, but then most people bought a new TV or AV receiver that can handle Atmos and since then no more transcoding.

How is your friends shield hooked up? Ethernet? Wifi?

All connected by cable. Cat. 6A

Also, I am on a 1Gbit connection here (Kansas City), and I remotely stream 4K to Orlando, FL, Lisbon Falls, ME, Denver, CO, and Tilburg, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands. So buffer size is not really the problem I wouldn’t expect. Since theoretically it’s the same for all of us.

Here is the data of one of the 4K Remux:

image
image734×521 47.1 KB

4

Hmm, that should work, especially if it’s direct playing. Out of curiosity, is the download speed for his connection measured from a PC or from the shield directly? I’ve read some reports somewhere of the new shields not always getting a gigabit link even though it’s wired to gigabit. Have you tried it on a 5GHz wireless connection? (Hopefully the source of the wifi is close by) Other than that, I got nothing.

How long are the pauses/stutters?

Edit: On a side note, my ISP has been talking about going 10Gbit here as well, so my home network is all 10Gbit ready, I rewired everything with Cat-7, installed 10Gbit NIC’s in the computers, and got a 10Gbit switch. Just waiting on a consumer router to have true 10Gbit WAN and LAN ports.

5

The interruptions are very short, often only 1-2 seconds, but every 10-15 seconds, so I suspected a buffer problem.

It has been measured directly on the shield. Yes someone had the same problem, always had only 300 Mbit (which should be enough for 60-70 Mbit streams) but he changed it at the dealer and now he has the full speed. W-Lan was already tried with 2 users. Is identical or partly worse with buffering.

Yes with me also everything was made new in the house with Cat.7 and 10 Gbit in each room. Luckily I could still have a say in that or only 1 Gbit would have been installed. Only just it brings only conditionally something if my users can not stream this now although more than enough bandwidth is available.

EDIT:
Web-rip streams up to 30 Mbps run smoothly for everyone. As soon as it goes simply to the Remux files the buffer problems come. This maybe as additional info. Therefore I came to the buffer problem.

6

Hmm… Out of curiosity, do you have this information set correctly:

image
image967×328 116 KB

It’s under the “Remote Access” portion of the server settings.

If so, then I would say you will need to enable the logging on his shield, and your server logs and submit them. The best way to do that is:

  1. Make sure settings>Debug is set to enabled and not verbose
  2. Shut down server
  3. restart server and wait 5 minutes
  4. while waiting have your friend setup his logging
  5. have him recreate the issue (play a 4K movie, wait for it to stutter a few times and then stop the movie)
  6. wait another 5 minutes, download the log files from the shield and from the server and drag the .zip files into the chat here. People will be able to read through them and give more information.

Also, for what it’s worth, I will need to re-rip a couple of my UHD Movies so I can re-test under your conditions. When I first started streaming 4K UHD I was streaming the Remux’s like you (to all the same places), however, now that I have sometimes 5 people watching 4K at once, when 4K has 100Mbit+ bursts sometimes, the internet becomes a bit crowded. So, I have transcoded all of my files down to 25Mbit with 75Mbit bursts using Staxrip.

One other thing he could try is to turn off the new player in the settings. Just go in and disable it and try playing again. I’ve noticed some odd quirks here and there with the new player.

1 Like
7

Thanks for the tips. I have now agreed with everyone on the weekend then we will do the tests and the logs I will then provide here. I hope that I can be helped then.

8

These are the first tests from this morning

Hopefully something will turn up.

more tests will follow this weekend.

Plex Media Server Logs_2020-02-22_10-00-31.zip (5,1 MB)

Plex-4k-Test-Shield-Remote-User.txt (1,0 MB)

9
  1. Test

4K-Test-Shield-Remote-2.txt (1,2 MB)

10

Setup iperf3 on your side and run iperf3 on the remote side and see what the throughput looks like.

11

Sorry, that doesn’t mean anything to me. What do I have to do exactly? I’m not familiar with command-line programs. But we have done several speed tests and as written, all have at least one Gbit connection in both directions. That can’t be the reason, so I posted all logs from the server and the two users where we tested it, so a professional should be able to use it.

12

Speedtest to other servers are only an indication to those specific servers. If you want to confirm/validate that you have full bandwidth between your server and specific remote networks where clients reside, iperf3 will do that.

Server side: iperf3 -s
Client side: iperf3 -R c -put.ip.address.here

13

does not work

always comes Connection Timed out

Firewall everything is enabled and IP is correct including port.

what else could be the cause?

14

You opened up TCP port 5201?

15

So in the meantime tests were made with several providers. All very good to excellent in terms of readings, but still the 4K playback does not work as it should. All providers say the problem is not the connection, so it must be Plex. I still suspect that the buffer needs to be increased or that the request for data must be stable. I keep seeing that it has pauses between sending and then buffering, even though both sides have no problem.

Every 7-8 seconds there are pauses in 4K playback. It just seems as if he asks for the data too late and then doesn’t follow up with reload. Because the data stream shows clearly that it loads about 3 seconds with about 200 Mbits and then nothing for 4 seconds and then it starts again, but then it is already too late and so there is again a 2-3 second interruption.

I don’t understand why this is such a big problem with the 4K playback. We all have 500 Mbit to 1 Gbit (Users) and 10 Gbit (Server) connections in Switzerland and Germany where I have some friends and as the values of Traceroute show all of them have good enough peering values:

To Traceroute 1:
7 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms ??.109.181.?? <- INIT7
8 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms ??.115.55.??? <- Telianet

For traceroute 2:
5 6 ms 1 ms 1 ms ??.109.128.??? <- INIT7
6 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms ??.157.206.??? <- German Telekom AG
7 16 ms 16 ms 16 ms ??.137.197.?? <- German Telekom AG

To traceroute 3:
9 3 ms 3 ms 2 ms ??.109.128.??? <- INIT7
10 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms ???.60.63.?? <- LAN Services AG

At 1080p to 20 Mbit there are absolutely no problems, even if the users have only 100 Mbit. But as soon as I try 4K with 30-90 Mbit even very strong connections (500 Mbit -1 Gbit) are not enough.

Again as a summary:

All users have tried different apps from Android (Shield Pro 2019), Samsung TV or Sony TV (Android OS)
All are connected by cable. No W-LAN networks.
All speed tests, peering tests are very good to excellent in terms of values.
The server is not even used to 10% capacity and locally it works without problems with 4K only remotely we have no chance.
We have tried everything from fiber to fiber, fiber to cable and fiber to xDSL. It makes no difference, there is always buffering.

16

FYI, analiti includes an iperf3 server and client. Works on Android / Android TV devices.

I’ve an iperf3 server running on my DS918+. That, with analiti, is an easy way to test throughput on my LAN & WiFi networks from my Shield, phone, etc.

1 Like
17

No idea what you all have with this iperf app.

Here are the results of a test, these values do not look good at all. One has fiber 10 Gbit (my server) and one has cable 1 Gbit (client). But he can send more than me?!?

C:\iperf>iperf3 -s

Server listening on 5201

Accepted connection from 84.74.64.90, port 57442
[ 5] local 192.168.2.39 port 5201 connected to 84.74.64.90 port 57444
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.00-1.01 sec 7.62 MBytes 63.3 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 1.01-2.01 sec 4.25 MBytes 35.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 2.01-3.01 sec 3.88 MBytes 32.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 3.01-4.01 sec 1.88 MBytes 15.7 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 4.01-5.00 sec 2.25 MBytes 19.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 5.00-6.01 sec 4.38 MBytes 36.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 6.01-7.00 sec 6.12 MBytes 52.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.01 sec 5.50 MBytes 45.9 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 8.01-9.01 sec 4.75 MBytes 39.7 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 9.01-10.01 sec 6.25 MBytes 52.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 10.01-10.03 sec 128 KBytes 38.6 Mbits/sec

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.00-10.03 sec 47.0 MBytes 39.3 Mbits/sec sender
[ 5] 0.00-10.03 sec 0.00 Bytes 0.00 bits/sec receiver

Server listening on 5201

Accepted connection from 84.74.64.90, port 57468
[ 5] local 192.168.2.39 port 5201 connected to 84.74.64.90 port 57472
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 8.11 MBytes 68.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 9.84 MBytes 82.5 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 9.74 MBytes 81.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 10.6 MBytes 88.9 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 11.4 MBytes 96.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 10.9 MBytes 91.7 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 10.7 MBytes 89.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 10.3 MBytes 86.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 10.1 MBytes 85.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 9.84 MBytes 82.6 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 10.00-10.07 sec 690 KBytes 85.2 Mbits/sec

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.00-10.07 sec 0.00 Bytes 0.00 bits/sec sender
[ 5] 0.00-10.07 sec 102 MBytes 85.2 Mbits/sec receiver

Server listening on 5201

18

Can no one help me how to get better values?