Only seeing the shared folder intermittently

Streaming & Network
#1

Hi all,

Recently discovered Infuse and wanted to use it in the future when I purchase a Sony 4K TV and Apple TV 4K.

I have been testing the similar set up using my PC and iPad (to mimic Apple TV 4K).

Some issues I have ran into: after setting up file sharing on my PC and able to see it being shared on the Infuse app on iPad. Every now and then the whole shared folder would become undiscoverable with the error message "An error occurred loading this content’ . Now, I do have a very large folder that was been shared, about 4 TB. When testing I did use a smaller folder and it was more stable but still intermittently it would disappear. What am I doing wrong? Is this “share the whole large single folder” method just too good to be true? And would using a MacOS to share folder with have better experience?

Is it pretty standard to use NAS when sharing such a large folder? Whereas for sharing using PC and Mac directly it’s better to just share smaller and singular folders that don’t contain thousands of other folders?

P.S.

I have had bad experience with NAS and would like to avoid them, although I read many threads were people sharing via a NAS with success. And my internet is pretty decent at 300 so I thought it wasn’t the issue.

Many thanks!!!

#2

When it worked it was like a life time dream come true…really want it to work on the Apple TV set up with no problem.

#3

You are more likely to have a more robust connection using a NAS than from a computer since they designed specifically for file transfers. Sorry your previous experience was bad. Internet connection doesn’t specifically dictate your wireless connection to your devices. Did you try a speed test in Infuse when it does connect? Sometimes this error occurs when your device is sleeping or inaccessible. Try making sure it’s awake first before playback as a starting point.

#4

I guess with such large folder NAS is still the way to go. I actually always wanted to do a speed test when it was working but was too happy enjoying the app so I forgot every time, and when I wanted to do a speed test it was encountering that error so I couldn’t do it LoL.

Will make sure to do that next time! Thank you for your help and Happy New Year!

#5

Welcome to the forum!

First, many times when using a PC as a server you will encounters many small issues that will have to be addressed. First, I’ve personally fought this same issue and one of the first problems is when the PC goes to sleep and is slow to respond to the wake commands.

All of my connections are using the SMB protocol and here’s what I’ve experienced and done.

One thing you can do to help this is to make sure you have the MAC address of your server in the advanced share settings in Infuse. This will speed up the wake and you’ll see less error messages.

Second thing you can try is to disable the sleep function of the PC, this is what I did and I never got the error message again. You can still have the screen sleep but don’t let the computer sleep.

As to the NAS, I recently went to this solution and I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner. It really has been pretty painless and now my main PC (Mac) is happy it can snooze now and then and the NAS is rock solid. Both were serving nearly 20 TB of files so either can work but the NAS is the way to go.

#6

Thank you so much for your input.

I will try your solution first, if it works well then maybe I will skip NAS, if not then NAS is the way to go!!! Hopefully this time I have better experience with NAS.