Trouble with 4K rips

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

Hi,

I have several 4K rips that I store on a cloud drive that I use. The smaller one are fine but anything larger than 20GB or with higher bitrates stutter and buffer and are basically unplayable.

The log I’ve uploaded if I’ve done it right is:

The files seem to play fine on a laptop that I own and my wired connection should be fine. Any tips appreciated,

thanks

2

Is the data cached locally like with Dropbox/NectCloud/Google Drive or is it streaming straight from the cloud ?

3

The problem seems to be with the playback from that webDAV source not being able to keep up with the bandwidth requirements of the file.

5

I’ve removed details of the log as it included a password (thanks to the user for pointing that out.)

Looks like that cloud server might just be slow then as I can access it via their add on and the same thing happens. I’m puzzled though as it runs like a dream on my laptop.

6

Straight from the cloud I believe.

7

The film’s average bitrate: is 62997 kb/s and it’s being sent over TLS encryption. You’re on a non-plus Vero4K, so its ethernet is limited to around 93 Mbits/sec, at best, without protocol overheads. You haven’t said what the laptop is but it’ll have a faster CPU and I’m guessing that it’s probably either on gigabit ethernet or 802.11ac WiFi.

8

Is this really the problem though? I remember Sam saying that Vero 4k+ shouldn’t really always be needed for 4K files and the gigabit function was nice to have but not a necessity. I don’t mind shelling out for a Vero 4k+ but I want to be sure that it will fix the problem.

Laptop is Lenovo V155
AMD Ryzen 5 3500U 2.1GHz

Wired on what should be a gigabit ethernet connection yes.

9

I can only play my larger files with a USB adapter on my 4k. I ran some tests some time back…

1 Like
10

If it doesn’t work fast enough, then there will be a reason for this. I can only provide suggestions as to why this is so.

  1. The average bit rate for the rip is 62,997 kbits/sec. That’s an average and the real-world stream will contain peaks that will be higher.
  2. TLS will create an overhead. Not huge, but it won’t help on a smaller CPU.
  3. You’re using WebDAV to get the data. I don’t have any practical experience of WebDAV but it’s unlikely to be particularly efficient.
  4. But I’m guessing that by far the biggest problem is network latency. On a local network, it might take 5 milliseconds to contact your server for the next block, whereas you might be seeing 10x or 20x that on “the cloud”. (And because it’s the cloud, it can be very difficult to know where the actual data server is physically located.) Plus, local storage can often take advantage of read-ahead to help speed things along. All in all, it’s never going to be as efficient as a reading from a LAN-based server.
1 Like
11

Thanks for this - just to note that on Kodi on the laptop the webDAV is fine too. So I guess I may just plump for the 4k+ and cross my fingers.

12

You could just buy a cheap USB Ethernet Adapter (I’m sure some on this forum can make a recommendation). This will get you about 300Mbps over USB 2.0 which will be an improvement.

You could also mount the webDAV shares via fstab, which would likely yield better performance as well.

15

Thanks, I do have a gigabit adapter, it gives a little bit of extra performance but not much. I find a restart of the box helps before playing 4K material too.

Also - that usb port is then taken up which means I’ll have to get a USB port expander for additional drives . I’ll have a think.

16

I would suggest checking CPU usage during playback using top or htop (a bit easier to read) to rule out the decryption being a limited factor

Cheers

Sam

17

Ok this is what I’m getting during playback:

1379×1012 107 KB

18

That doesn’t look too bad – assuming WebDAV implementation is not pegged to a single thread.

You could also try running iftop to see bandwidth usage during playback.

WebDAV isn’t the fastest protocol in the world – usually because it’s going through a script. For example with NextCloud, there’s PHP and MySQL that need to be used for each file request.

You might get some performance improvements by using fstab which may allow for more read-ahead. See How to mount WebDAV share | sleeplessbeastie's notes.

19

I’ll try and get a spare moment or 2 to wrap my head around that, thanks.

20

I would say so too. Cloud storage often does bandwidth throttling so anything above the needed bitrate will be dropped. He should test at what nominal speed he’s able to download the files to get an idea of the maximum bandwidth. This will be unrelated to his ISP given bandwidth, of course.