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Video Stutter woes -- a possible discovery

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Rich73

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 12, 2008
6
0
Most of my ~100 movies are Handbrake'ed, 3000 kps, a-par'ed.

With my wireless-N router and decent host PC many of these streamed movies are choppy during some scenes (even with ATV 2.0). With the ATV hardwired to my router they look great. This did not used to be the case when I first started this H264 conversion quest with my DVD library and on an older wireless-G.

Lately, I have been syncing my modest ~20 gig music collection down to ATV. Yesterday, while troubleshooting this problem I turned this feature off. The video stuttering problem immediately disappeared.

Could it be possible that the ~20gig of data stored on the ATV takes up some space allocated for streaming video buffering? I agree that this seems improbable but seemed to be the silver bullet for my problem.

Can anyone recreate this?

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MWillis561

MWillis561

macrumors member
Jan 16, 2008
40
0
While your Apple TV is connected with iTunes through your host computer it will every once in a while check to see if anything needs to be synced. This would, I assume, cause some congestion. But only for a few seconds.
 
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Rich73

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 12, 2008
6
0
I saw a noticeable difference when upgrading from 'G' to 'N' in the time it takes to start a Movie, browse chapters, etc. Additionally, a couple CES's ago some company demonstrated a "Wireless 1080p HDMI" box which seemed to just be 802.11n with a fancy name. The wireless connection should be more than capable of streaming our movies with the relatively low bandwidth requirements.

The pattern to the stuttering is definitely in scenes of increased detail.

I even unplugged our older wireless land line phone thinking that it could be interfering somehow... I am running out of ideas. But hey, it works now and looks awesome. I'll do more testing tonight. I really like the idea of media-less media.

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Nimiety

macrumors regular
Sep 6, 2006
117
1
Bingo - I've recreated this by accident!

I've been copying my CD collection losslessly so I'm now up closer to 100 gigs of music. After seeing my photos disappear from my 160 gig unit, I set photos to sync over first, then about 80 gigs of movies and shows, then music, leaving my with just a couple of megs of free space. Over the past few days, shows that were synced played fine but anything streaming would begin stuttering so badly it was unwatchable. (yes, I tried both wired and wireless - no change). Rebooting would fix it for a short time.

Testing against an unsynced episode of Kitchen Nightmares, I created a playlist of a much smaller volume of music to leave some free space, and what do you know - things have returned to the way they were before I loaded things up so badly.

Problem was noticed under both 2.2 and 2.3, and thankfully I came on this thread - not all stuttering is network-based!

N......
 
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