Raspberry PI - Question

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networkn

Networkn
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#123377 5-Jul-2013 11:16

Hi There!

I just got the RP B Model and Xbian and RaspBMC. Most of the time I notice it's really good and fast, but sometimes there are lags in the interface, and last night I had a strange problem for the second time where I played a xvid episode from my NAS, and it was buffering every few seconds. I stopped it and played it again 10 seconds later, and it was fine for the whole hour.

Do these units suffer from inconsistent performance, perhaps due to throttling or something that I can turn off ? Is there an addon I can switch on that will allow me to see what speed the media is being pulled from the source at? I have a N wireless network, backed onto a gigabit lan and I regularly check and get really excellent performance all around. Wireless I am usually 20-30MB/s and LAN I could expect 80-130MB/s depending on devices and type of files.

michaelmurfy

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#849611 5-Jul-2013 11:30

Is the Wireless N dongle on a powered USB hub? The Raspberry Pi only outputs 250ma on it's USB ports so might be the dongle is not getting enough power.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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robjg63

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#849612 5-Jul-2013 11:33

Does it buffer when connected by cable to your LAN?
My guess would be issues with the wifi, but saying that I have noticed on my PI that its never great to tax it to quickly after start up - maybe there is some linux housekeeping/checking for updates for the first few minutes.

What sort of wifi dongle do you have?

Come to think of it there is a cache in xbmc - The advancedsettings.xml file has all sorts of things to play with (be careful)
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Advancedsettings.xml
You could perhaps increase the cache size - look for cachemembuffersize
It might take a second or 2 extra to start playing the file - but could smooth things out for you.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

robjg63

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#849614 5-Jul-2013 11:36

Michael makes a good point - You have reminded me that I found the USB dongle HAS to be plugged into the USB port closest to the PI board.

The second USB port seems to get a bit less power for some reason and did do some rather funny things when I initially had the dongle plugged in there.

I have an edimax dongle and it seems to be ok when plugged into the first slot on the board.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

deadlyllama

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#849689 5-Jul-2013 12:56

robjg63: Michael makes a good point - You have reminded me that I found the USB dongle HAS to be plugged into the USB port closest to the PI board.

The second USB port seems to get a bit less power for some reason and did do some rather funny things when I initially had the dongle plugged in there.

I have an edimax dongle and it seems to be ok when plugged into the first slot on the board.

Use a powered hub if you're worried about high power USB devices.

I had performance issues streaming 30Mbps H.264 over the LAN to my Raspbmc, which I solved by switching from a USB WiFi adapter to a Cisco wifi bridge. I also switched from SMB filesharing to WebDAV. The switch to WebDAV made everything better, the Cisco bridge made the high bitrate stuff watchable. I assume you'd be OK if you used a "good" USB WiFi adapter rather than one of those thumbnail sized ones, but I had other devices (VoIP, squeezebox) that benefited from the bridge too so that was the obvious option for me.

ajobbins

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#849701 5-Jul-2013 13:28

I have Asus USB-N10 wifi adapter plugged into my Pi (Directly).

Works perfectly. Streams 1080p content over the WiFi with no issues.

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dwl

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#850114 6-Jul-2013 14:34

networkn: Is there an addon I can switch on that will allow me to see what speed the media is being pulled from the source at?

You can see the status of the stream rates and cache while playing video from an external source which will give an idea of speed and how much spare capacity is available. On my Samsung remote the "Return" remote button shows the "Video codec" info which should show the cache filling on external sources (mine tops out of 20MB). You can also access this by using the select button during playback and scroll across to the setting icon on the right when it shows the transport control icons. On local SMB sources it doesn't seem to use the cache but the stream details are still useful to understand rates.

Jemahl

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#850127 6-Jul-2013 15:25

RaspBMC itself (and Raspbian for that matter) is still very much a work in progress. It works for most people most of the time, but chances are your particular setup may have just found an annoying bug that will be fixed in an upcoming release.

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Jemahl

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#850128 6-Jul-2013 15:29

Forgot to add: I use RaspBMC and it works just fine, except for needing a reboot every other week to clear a freezing issue. This is using a 2A power supply too.