Streambaby -> TiVoHD buffering every 30-40 minutes

[MitchV]

I've got a TiVoHD hardwired to my gigabit network. My understanding is that the transfer limit is about 20mbps.

My question/observation has to do with a 720p xvid file that I tried to watch today. The video/sound were great, but after about 30 minutes the video stuttered and re-buffered.

If the buffering was due to bandwidth limitations (related to the TiVo hardware), I would expect this to happen more frequently. Also, after buffering, a good chunk of the movie appears to be available in memory... then it runs out again. The streaming PC is rock solid and the hardware exceeds any requirements Streambaby might have.

Any ideas why this happens or what I can do about it? Is this common and should I just not bother attempting to stream videos that are in high resolution?

Thanks in advance!

[arctanstevo]

it is covered in the FAQ or thread somewhere - it is a limitation - don't remember exactly, but it is eitehr at 1gb or 2gb - it's actually flushing an reloading a buffer that is full.

[Yoav]

it is covered in the FAQ or thread somewhere - it is a limitation - don't remember exactly, but it is eitehr at 1gb or 2gb - it's actually flushing an reloading a buffer that is full.

1.1Gb I believe.

Just encode your movie at a lower bitrate if it's frustrating you... or use pytivo to transfer the movie instead of stream it.

[MitchV]

I thought something like that might be the case... but I wasn't certain that was what I was seeing. The movie in question was over 3GB in size.

So this must be a TiVo software limitation... my little popcornhour has no hard drive and I've streamed 1080p movies without a hiccup.

I haven't tried Netflix with TiVo. I assume that service doesn't suffer from the same problem? Is it because the Netflix movies are under 1GB or does TiVo handle silverlight differently?

It's not a huge deal... I love my TiVo and I thought that the combination of Streambaby and my TiVo would make my popcornhour obsolete. The Streambaby menu navigation is much better than the popcornhour but I can't give up my unbuffered HD movies.

Thanks for the answers!

[wmcbrine]

The Netflix system (which is not Silverlight, BTW) works completely differently, yes. What Streambaby does is more like the YouTube viewer. And... it's based on reverse engineering and educated guessing (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=401163) about an undocumented function.

[MitchV]

The Netflix system (which is not Silverlight, BTW) works completely differently, yes.


Ahhhhhh... you are right. I just looked at an article and it appears that this is where Netflix is headed. I checked out a Silverlight demo recently and it was pretty impressive.

Streambaby is fantastic... I can't believe TiVo doesn't offer similar software or want to make this kind of functionality easily available. If not for the buffering, my TiVo would replace my popcornhour or the WDHD units that are becoming popular.

Another unrelated question... I'm able to stream Hulu to my TV via my Popcornhour and PlayOn software. I know that my TiVoHD is not a DLNA device... but is there a way to bridge the gap between something like Streambaby and PlayOn software?

[ionman1964]

Now I put the path "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe". I also tried "C:\Program Files(x86)\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe" into the Streambaby.bat file and it displays all the usage info for java and the options for usage so I must have done something wrong. It displays all the usage info and then Streambaby starts ok but still gives me the error "FFmpegJavaVideoModule: Unable to load FFmpeg native libraries". The rest seems ok it says Listener: added factory and then Main: streambaby ready & listening. Please realize that there is no urgency for a response on this because it works fine. It is just curiosity that has got me on this. Thank-you.

[ionman1964]

Here is my streambaby.bat:
@echo off
set LAUNCHDIR="%CD%"
pushd "%~dp0\native"
"C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe"
java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Xmx256m -Xmx256m -jar "%~dp0/jbin/streambaby.jar" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8
echo Exited.
pause
popd

[petew]

Use the push feature in Streambaby 0.27. It takes a couple of minutes before there's enough of the video transfered to be able to start watching but once it gets going the full file will be transfered. I've been using this technique to watch some 5Gb files in 720p .mkv format. Select Push from streambaby and after 2-3 minutes the program will be in NPL ready to watch.

There's a couple of minor irritations which may be Tivo rather than streambaby issues:

1) Approx 30% of the time a transfer will stop (Blue light goes out) within a miniute of it starting. I just re-try and it always works the second time.

2) Even though Tivo reports >10 minutes of video transfered an attempt to play the file will give a "not enough of the file has been transfered" error. Pressing the tvio button and navigating back through NPL usually resolves the issue.