I’m running Infuse on an Apple TV 4K 2nd gen; the Apple TV is directly connected to my ISP router.
I have a hard drive (Maxtor One Touch) with my movies in it connected to the UsB port on the router.
Whenever I try to stream 4k videos it takes maybe 1 to 2 minutes to start streaming and sometimes I get buffering during playback.
When doing a speed test on one of the media files I get around 15Mbps, is this too slow?
If so, how can I improve this?
Do I need a better hard disk or is the idea of connecting something via usb to the router not a good one?
Do I need a NAS?
Yes that is too slow to play anything substantial like full blu-ray rips and forget 4K. If that is the speed over Ethernet then most likely it is the router that has a limit on the hard drive speed. A NAS would definitely change everything dramatically. I’m getting 300+Mbps with mine and others get more.
A few things to try, I’d try changing the SMB from “auto” to SMB2 and do a speed test, then change it to “Legacy” and do a speed test to see if either is notably faster.
Using the router isn’t usually a great idea since it’s design is to “route” network traffic, not “serve” data so it’s not going to be as good as a device designed to handle server duties.
A NAS would be the optimal way to go, and remember, figure what you need and add a bunch. A decent 4 bay+ NAS will give you much longer life than trying to get by with a two bay device. I’ve been REAL pleased with the Synology DS920+ and I started with only 3 of the 4 bays occupied. I later added a 4th drive and it just keeps on working.
I just bought a NAS, and set it up as a network drive in windows.
I’ve copied over a couple of files; the speed test from infuse now shows around 70Mbps average and some 130Mbps peak
However, it takes several seconds to show the files in the Nas share, the file still buffers for 30 seconds, plays for 2s and then stops
A 2 bay NAS with just one “small” 4/8TB NAS drive would probably cost the same as getting a new faster router and a new hard drive, especially if you can catch a sale.
Well ya made me dig out my manual for my WDMyCloud and surprise surprise, it is USB 3.0 on the expansion port. I am in the process of retiring mine from serving videos and moving everything over to my Synology. The WD has shown it’s age a bit lately by napping a bit more and not waking up as fast. LOL I guess that means that I’m also ready to be retired again…
I’ll find another use for it serving music files and photos so it’s not totally done yet.
It’s a Synology DS120j
I’m connecting Infuse directly to the NAS; I just set it up on Windows to be able to transfer files to it. I only mentioned this because sometimes when I click on the network drive in ‘my pc’ everything freezes for a several seconds
When I open the directory from Infuse it takes maybe 20 seconds of displaying the spinning wheel before showing the available medias and each media buffers for 5-10 seconds. No other interruptions whatsoever after that, but I was maybe expecting faster loading times
Is the NAS perhaps sleeping or in hibernation? What happens if you use the infuse library instead of opening a directory? If you’re browsing via folders/files, infuse will have to query the files plus all of the details which takes time.
This is normal, you’ll want to go to the Hardware & Power Settings in the DiskStation Manager and see what you have set for the hibernation. When your disk are in hibernation it will take several seconds for the NAS to wake, yawn, scratch and rub it’s eyes before it can server data.
I’d suggest setting a hibernation time of at least a 2 to 3 hours just so it stays awake for movies and other long videos.
Honestly, as long as you have a NAS rated hard drive installed the NAS is rated for continuous duty and with hibernation turned off you’ll get no wake up pauses.
Could you run a speed test on one of the movies that is giving you problems and post the results here with a screen cap of the graph?
Is the NAS and ATV still going through the old router?
Synology DS120j has Gigabit LAN on it and so does the ATV 4K 2nd Generation, so provided you have a 1Gbit switch between the two of them or they are both connected to your ISP router via ethernet you should be able to get up to around 120MBytes a second which is plenty more than enough for 4K content, even the heavy H264 files. Sounds like you were using USB 2.0 on your original post but with the NAS you should be able to get 1000mbits Per Second on the Gigabit LAN, so around 10 times the speed of USB 2.0.
I had this as well in a house I used to live in, I asked for Ethernet ports in every room when it was built, the electricians wired them all as RJ11 style and even after they came back to install all the 8 wires the ports still only gave 10MB/s…ended up requiring new ports all round but got there in the end!
400Mbps is plenty for 4K, you should be able to get more than that though, if you are using SMB from the NAS if it has an FTP function use that instead, or test it, I saw a huge boost when moving to FTP. SMB may be adding various security overheads and limiting speed, where as plain old FTP does not and if its just in a LAN then its fine. I wouldn’t use FTP for external connections of course.
