How I did TV in the kitchen from Samsung, ue40c6510uw, WD TV Live and 802.11n
I want to talk about what had to meet organizing such a seemingly simple thing as watching movies in the kitchen. Do not step on my rake, look for your own.
TK
It's very simple: in the kitchen there should be some device that shows movies in 720p (ideally 1080p) of popular formats in popular containers. Special requirements 3: the choice of the audio track at the user's request, the presence of a wireless interface (an annoying miscalculation during repair makes it difficult to lay a cable) and all the wealth must be sold in this country, I am not on friendly terms with ebay and mail.
')
Project
I planned to go on an easy and universal way: panel + computer. The advantages are obvious: the flexibility and omnivorousness of the computer as a player + the ability to use it for other purposes. There are also disadvantages: the abundance of inappropriate wires, the presence of a keyboard and mouse, the nontriviality of connecting a “TV” remote control, the impossibility of a completely silent solution, and the price.
The Eee Box (or similar Acer) was released as a candidate for nVidia ION, but he had to be given up for a completely unexpected reason: there were no offers to sell it at all. Plus, I would have to decide something to replace the 802.11g interface with n. The idea to put mac mini was considered decadent, as its price is too high. Came to the aid of the manufacturers of the TV, which seems to have embedded everything you need right into it.
Television
Looking at what different manufacturers offer today, I decided that the TV should support 1080p, be with LED-backlit and 100Hz frequency. LED is considered a necessary quality if the TV is hanging on the wall, otherwise it stands out from it, it is not beautiful. Samsung was selected as the 6th series of the 2010 model year, brought home and hung on the wall. The built-in player perfectly opens any file from the drive (people say that it’s not so omnivorous, but I didn’t find what I don’t eat among my files), it allows you to choose a soundtrack. Great, I thought, and now let's do the same thing, but over the network. And then the problems started.
Media servers
I have never been a fan of cycling for the sake of simplifying life for “ordinary users”, I consider this approach to be deeply flawed. First of all, because no one deals with the question “what a regular user needs” except for a couple of companies, and the rest mold it as the programmer saw looking at the TK that the marketer did while looking at the market research that the aliens did. On a Samsung TV, it turned out that the player can only access the network via the DLNA protocol, but cannot use CIFS or NFS.
What is the problem to go to the network and take a video file there? The user must enter a password! And he may also need information about resource names and paths in them. Plus, it would be nice not to show files to the media player that he does not understand, you can logically separate muzlo from movies and provide the ability to transcode video-audio if the network does not keep up or the client does not understand the format. Great ideas that are implemented in the DLNA standard (uPnP is not supported by the Samsung, so I can’t say anything about this type of server, but I assume that the problems are the same and they are not needed either).
First I came across Twonky Media Sever, which already worked on my WD Share Space file server. TV lost some files without problems, some did not perceive. MKV did not perceive everything. Since the file server is low-powered, the transcode option was not available, reinstalled Twonky on a large computer. The result is exactly the same, transcoding did not help.
Next was Elgato eyeconnect with the same result: some of the files are playing, some are not.
Next, find out the power of the global ambush at the DLNA protocol level: the inability to select a soundtrack. The solution was in the form of PS3Mediaserver, which virtually replicated the file into several (one per track) and was able to transcode movies in the required format for the TV. Very cool, but there is 1 problem: no matter how much I fought and did not read the forums, no matter how much I tried the settings, I did not perceive the files.
By inertia, I tried Mediatomb with the same result.
It became clear that without an external player nowhere.
Player
I stopped my choice on WD TV Live. First of all, he can do everything I need. Secondly, unlike Popcorn, it does not stand as a wing of the Boeing. Thirdly, a WiFi dongle with support n, which I had, approaches it without problems (Trendnet TEW664UB, was chosen because it approached the TV, since Samsung does not supply its own WiFi dongles to Russia, and it will come from Amazon not soon). Fourth, WD TV is small and supports HDMI, which allows you to hide it out of sight on the refrigerator, and only 1 wire will go to the TV.
The player solved all compatibility issues, but 2 more problems emerged:
- VOBs stutter over the network. This is a recognized problem of firmware, which should have been solved in the current firmware (and so it is written in a relaxed way), but they did not decide.
- other films also inode stutter.
The second problem was a bit more complicated. The fact is that I have an Asus WL-500W router with firmware "from Oleg's followers" and data transmission via WiFi is not its strongest side. I decided to single out a separate WiFi segment that will serve only the TV using Apple Airport Express (it is guaranteed to support n). The result came out almost satisfactory, almost all the problems were gone when I did 2 things:
- WiFi has such non-obvious parameter Multicast Rate. The hint in the settings for it is indistinct (they say, this parameter determines the Multicast Rate, choose the default), but in fact it is very important. This is the minimum bandwidth that is allocated to the client. The larger the value, the smaller the coverage radius, the smaller the possible number of customers, but the greater the stability of the speed of each customer. By default, there is a setting for Internet cafes, 2 megabits.
- In smb.conf of the file server, it was necessary to register socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF = 65536 SO_SNDBUF = 65536, which tells the server that we have a fast network and we need minimal delays.
Almost everything, but not all, because WiFi is slow.
How to make WiFi 802.11n work faster than 802.11g and get it to work more efficiently than 22 MB / s? Very simple: replace it with ethernet.
Why does this happen, because on the box with the equipment the figure is drawn 300 megabits per second? Because 802.11n for working at speeds higher than g should use several channels, up to 2/3 of the whole range. In practical terms, this means that in an isolated room, where no one else uses WiFi and the equipment at its frequencies, the speed for one client will be close to that indicated in the advertisement. In reality, if at least 1 item from the list is executed:
- there are clients that do not support n
- many customers (recalling "many" is more than 1st)
- there are still segments that are sitting on your channel (they definitely are in an apartment building)
- there are neighbors with not controlled by you WiFi (access points which tend to capture several channels)
everything falls into g and the maximum that manages to squeeze out is 22 megabits. Even if the receiver and transmitter are in direct view. You can add the item “receiver manufacturer and transmitter should be the same” to the list, because n has not ratified for a long time, and nobody was shy about the draft-n rivet, understanding the standard in its own way.
Why is this all and why is 22 MB / s low? Generally speaking, 22 megabits per second is quite a lot. Enough to watch the web, online videos, listen to music and play network games. Even for HD video quality this is almost enough; a 720p movie (and 1080p) compressed x264 will have an average bitrate of about 5 megabits. But the fact of the matter is that an average, in a dynamic scene can grow up to 25 or more, a plug will occur, which can be badly handled by the player. For example, WDTV after plugging loses the synchronization of the video stream in time (the video is played faster or slower, but there is no sound). We have to press for a pause, wait until everything returns to its place and only then look further. When you watch a movie like this, you have time to learn all the places where the image changes dramatically, and most of the special effects can not be seen, you have to scroll.
So it goes.
Conclusion
For some secret reason, manufacturers who make just excellent hardware (Samsung, WD) still produce very strange firmware, and what is written in the advertising booklet may not correspond to reality. WiFi is also suitable for reading mail and viewing SD content.
UPDATE
802.11n? Plc
Last night I tried to replace one technology with another, because, unexpectedly, solovjeff offered me 2 Trendnet TPL-303e (say up to 200 Mbit / s, I cling to each other at ~ 100), for which he thanks a lot. Simply put, these are things that allow you to make a large managed switch on as many ports as there are these devices from the transmission lines of electricity in an apartment (I have 2). Measurements did not do, only tests for watching movies, and then I can accomplish more details.
- WiFi is noticeably more stable in terms of unexpected speed drops.
- noticeably faster than WiFi: of my 3 test fragments, only the “Sita” captions in 1080p remained braking, where such colored fireworks (which apparently don’t cuddle at all) and then, now the player handles this situation normally, does not fall into out-of-sync.
- subject to interference. In the same outlet sits a refrigerator, when it turns on, the speed drops somewhat.
- configuration utility written in .Net 1.1. I will not even comment on how it works. Fortunately, the task of splitting into VLANs is not worth it.
Total: the task is completed by 99%, of course, this 1% is annoying, but I will not pick the wall and open the plinth yet. In principle, if you put htpc with VLC instead of wdtv and unscrew the prefetch from VLC, then everything will be completely smooth.
PS
His wife's comment: “and this is all in order not to wear a USB flash drive?”.
TK
It's very simple: in the kitchen there should be some device that shows movies in 720p (ideally 1080p) of popular formats in popular containers. Special requirements 3: the choice of the audio track at the user's request, the presence of a wireless interface (an annoying miscalculation during repair makes it difficult to lay a cable) and all the wealth must be sold in this country, I am not on friendly terms with ebay and mail.
')
Project
I planned to go on an easy and universal way: panel + computer. The advantages are obvious: the flexibility and omnivorousness of the computer as a player + the ability to use it for other purposes. There are also disadvantages: the abundance of inappropriate wires, the presence of a keyboard and mouse, the nontriviality of connecting a “TV” remote control, the impossibility of a completely silent solution, and the price.
The Eee Box (or similar Acer) was released as a candidate for nVidia ION, but he had to be given up for a completely unexpected reason: there were no offers to sell it at all. Plus, I would have to decide something to replace the 802.11g interface with n. The idea to put mac mini was considered decadent, as its price is too high. Came to the aid of the manufacturers of the TV, which seems to have embedded everything you need right into it.
Television
Looking at what different manufacturers offer today, I decided that the TV should support 1080p, be with LED-backlit and 100Hz frequency. LED is considered a necessary quality if the TV is hanging on the wall, otherwise it stands out from it, it is not beautiful. Samsung was selected as the 6th series of the 2010 model year, brought home and hung on the wall. The built-in player perfectly opens any file from the drive (people say that it’s not so omnivorous, but I didn’t find what I don’t eat among my files), it allows you to choose a soundtrack. Great, I thought, and now let's do the same thing, but over the network. And then the problems started.
Media servers
I have never been a fan of cycling for the sake of simplifying life for “ordinary users”, I consider this approach to be deeply flawed. First of all, because no one deals with the question “what a regular user needs” except for a couple of companies, and the rest mold it as the programmer saw looking at the TK that the marketer did while looking at the market research that the aliens did. On a Samsung TV, it turned out that the player can only access the network via the DLNA protocol, but cannot use CIFS or NFS.
What is the problem to go to the network and take a video file there? The user must enter a password! And he may also need information about resource names and paths in them. Plus, it would be nice not to show files to the media player that he does not understand, you can logically separate muzlo from movies and provide the ability to transcode video-audio if the network does not keep up or the client does not understand the format. Great ideas that are implemented in the DLNA standard (uPnP is not supported by the Samsung, so I can’t say anything about this type of server, but I assume that the problems are the same and they are not needed either).
First I came across Twonky Media Sever, which already worked on my WD Share Space file server. TV lost some files without problems, some did not perceive. MKV did not perceive everything. Since the file server is low-powered, the transcode option was not available, reinstalled Twonky on a large computer. The result is exactly the same, transcoding did not help.
Next was Elgato eyeconnect with the same result: some of the files are playing, some are not.
Next, find out the power of the global ambush at the DLNA protocol level: the inability to select a soundtrack. The solution was in the form of PS3Mediaserver, which virtually replicated the file into several (one per track) and was able to transcode movies in the required format for the TV. Very cool, but there is 1 problem: no matter how much I fought and did not read the forums, no matter how much I tried the settings, I did not perceive the files.
By inertia, I tried Mediatomb with the same result.
It became clear that without an external player nowhere.
Player
I stopped my choice on WD TV Live. First of all, he can do everything I need. Secondly, unlike Popcorn, it does not stand as a wing of the Boeing. Thirdly, a WiFi dongle with support n, which I had, approaches it without problems (Trendnet TEW664UB, was chosen because it approached the TV, since Samsung does not supply its own WiFi dongles to Russia, and it will come from Amazon not soon). Fourth, WD TV is small and supports HDMI, which allows you to hide it out of sight on the refrigerator, and only 1 wire will go to the TV.
The player solved all compatibility issues, but 2 more problems emerged:
- VOBs stutter over the network. This is a recognized problem of firmware, which should have been solved in the current firmware (and so it is written in a relaxed way), but they did not decide.
- other films also inode stutter.
The second problem was a bit more complicated. The fact is that I have an Asus WL-500W router with firmware "from Oleg's followers" and data transmission via WiFi is not its strongest side. I decided to single out a separate WiFi segment that will serve only the TV using Apple Airport Express (it is guaranteed to support n). The result came out almost satisfactory, almost all the problems were gone when I did 2 things:
- WiFi has such non-obvious parameter Multicast Rate. The hint in the settings for it is indistinct (they say, this parameter determines the Multicast Rate, choose the default), but in fact it is very important. This is the minimum bandwidth that is allocated to the client. The larger the value, the smaller the coverage radius, the smaller the possible number of customers, but the greater the stability of the speed of each customer. By default, there is a setting for Internet cafes, 2 megabits.
- In smb.conf of the file server, it was necessary to register socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF = 65536 SO_SNDBUF = 65536, which tells the server that we have a fast network and we need minimal delays.
Almost everything, but not all, because WiFi is slow.
How to make WiFi 802.11n work faster than 802.11g and get it to work more efficiently than 22 MB / s? Very simple: replace it with ethernet.
Why does this happen, because on the box with the equipment the figure is drawn 300 megabits per second? Because 802.11n for working at speeds higher than g should use several channels, up to 2/3 of the whole range. In practical terms, this means that in an isolated room, where no one else uses WiFi and the equipment at its frequencies, the speed for one client will be close to that indicated in the advertisement. In reality, if at least 1 item from the list is executed:
- there are clients that do not support n
- many customers (recalling "many" is more than 1st)
- there are still segments that are sitting on your channel (they definitely are in an apartment building)
- there are neighbors with not controlled by you WiFi (access points which tend to capture several channels)
everything falls into g and the maximum that manages to squeeze out is 22 megabits. Even if the receiver and transmitter are in direct view. You can add the item “receiver manufacturer and transmitter should be the same” to the list, because n has not ratified for a long time, and nobody was shy about the draft-n rivet, understanding the standard in its own way.
Why is this all and why is 22 MB / s low? Generally speaking, 22 megabits per second is quite a lot. Enough to watch the web, online videos, listen to music and play network games. Even for HD video quality this is almost enough; a 720p movie (and 1080p) compressed x264 will have an average bitrate of about 5 megabits. But the fact of the matter is that an average, in a dynamic scene can grow up to 25 or more, a plug will occur, which can be badly handled by the player. For example, WDTV after plugging loses the synchronization of the video stream in time (the video is played faster or slower, but there is no sound). We have to press for a pause, wait until everything returns to its place and only then look further. When you watch a movie like this, you have time to learn all the places where the image changes dramatically, and most of the special effects can not be seen, you have to scroll.
So it goes.
Conclusion
For some secret reason, manufacturers who make just excellent hardware (Samsung, WD) still produce very strange firmware, and what is written in the advertising booklet may not correspond to reality. WiFi is also suitable for reading mail and viewing SD content.
UPDATE
802.11n? Plc
Last night I tried to replace one technology with another, because, unexpectedly, solovjeff offered me 2 Trendnet TPL-303e (say up to 200 Mbit / s, I cling to each other at ~ 100), for which he thanks a lot. Simply put, these are things that allow you to make a large managed switch on as many ports as there are these devices from the transmission lines of electricity in an apartment (I have 2). Measurements did not do, only tests for watching movies, and then I can accomplish more details.
- WiFi is noticeably more stable in terms of unexpected speed drops.
- noticeably faster than WiFi: of my 3 test fragments, only the “Sita” captions in 1080p remained braking, where such colored fireworks (which apparently don’t cuddle at all) and then, now the player handles this situation normally, does not fall into out-of-sync.
- subject to interference. In the same outlet sits a refrigerator, when it turns on, the speed drops somewhat.
- configuration utility written in .Net 1.1. I will not even comment on how it works. Fortunately, the task of splitting into VLANs is not worth it.
Total: the task is completed by 99%, of course, this 1% is annoying, but I will not pick the wall and open the plinth yet. In principle, if you put htpc with VLC instead of wdtv and unscrew the prefetch from VLC, then everything will be completely smooth.
PS
His wife's comment: “and this is all in order not to wear a USB flash drive?”.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/117305/
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