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Problems playing while downloading

O

Oldred

Well-known member
Hi

I have the Strato C player and a Terrabit server currently. The server has room for 24 4k UHD movies. Today I snapped up 6 of the western bundle just before going in to watch one of our existing movies. Something that I had understood the terra servers coped with. i.e. playing while still downloading. I had expected that perhaps download speeds might be impacted but that playing would be prioritised.

The movie was Shawshank Redemption (for the umpteenth time) and almost immediately it flashed up an alert at the top of the screen saying that it was having problems playing the movie. We left it for 5 mins or so but it remained the same and so I paused the downloads and have resumed the downloads since watching the movies. The pause etc. has all worked fine. Just a bit confused as to why I can't download a different movie while watching a movie? I had thought that was one of the features of the Terra?

The terra and player sit right next to each other and we have never had a problem before. Indeed while paused there were no further hiccups and 'Andy and Red' played out their story beautifully for yet another time. :)

Any comments/ideas
 
Your understanding is correct, your system should be able to playback a movie while downloading from the Store to your Terra at the same time. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer as to why your system is not performing as expected. How is your LAN setup? (What Switch are you using for the K components.)

Jim
 
cinelife said:
Your understanding is correct, your system should be able to playback a movie while downloading from the Store to your Terra at the same time. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer as to why your system is not performing as expected. How is your LAN setup? (What Switch are you using for the K components.)

Jim
Click to expand...
They are on the same switch and all traffic to the K boxes Is on its own virtual LAN. It’s been fine. After the resume it downloaded an HDR in 17m, a UHD in 12m and a blu ray in 5 mins. So speeds seem OK. I don’t throttle it at all. Download times have gradually slowed as it’s filled up. So started circa 800mps and now between 550 and 650 and I assume variance is based on K’s own server traffic volumes. Just didn’t expect playback issues at all.

I can reach out to the installer who sets up our networks anyway but I don’t think anything is wrong.

Maybe naively, I assumed that if there were issues when playing movies that the server would be flagged to throttle download speed when the player wasn’t getting what it needed. Maybe it’s not that sophisticated.
 
Understood, and agree that it doesn't sound like the LAN is a problem, so I doubt your installer can help. If it's your Terra, your system logs should ID the problem. I suppose it could also be a problem with Store downloads, but K will know that as well, so your answer may have to wait until you can get with Support, hopefully tomorrow. Sorry I'm not more help.

Jim
 
Your Encore system is definitely designed to throttle downloads and prioritize playback.

I suppose the issue could be due to a hard drive starting to fail (or at least starting to generate read errors), but if that really were the case, I’d expect you to see more playback issues than just when a download is happening. Sticking to that thought, I’m more inclined to suspect a network issue but wouldn’t rule out the other. It is just that a hard drive failure is much less common and network errors appear in abundance . Jim already pointed out the obvious to check with K support… I’d reiterate that may be your best move as their logs may be able to highlight an issue with the network connection or a hard drive. Good luck!!

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Thanks to you both. It’s not a major inconvenience to pause downloads while watching but I will pursue it in case as you suggest, in case it is an early warning of a future issue and addressing that early would make sense.

Cheers
 
It certainly should work as you expected. I encountered a situation recently on my own system where I had playback-related hiccups and I wasn't downloading anything at the time. Our engineering team is looking into that one right now, but the early suspicion is that the Terra was busy doing some database updates because the system had been idle for an extended period right up until I turned it on to play a movie, so it was essentially doing some catch-up housekeeping. Again, that should not cause playback issues, but the thinking is that perhaps it didn't suspend that housekeeping quickly enough when playback started.

By any chance had your system been idle for awhile before you made your purchases and then sat down to start a movie?
 
MikeKobb said:
It certainly should work as you expected. I encountered a situation recently on my own system where I had playback-related hiccups and I wasn't downloading anything at the time. Our engineering team is looking into that one right now, but the early suspicion is that the Terra was busy doing some database updates because the system had been idle for an extended period right up until I turned it on to play a movie, so it was essentially doing some catch-up housekeeping. Again, that should not cause playback issues, but the thinking is that perhaps it didn't suspend that housekeeping quickly enough when playback started.

By any chance had your system been idle for awhile before you made your purchases and then sat down to start a movie?
Click to expand...
Yes, it had. It’s in a ‘cinema room’ that we tend to only watch movies in there and this was the first of the day and for various reasons it had been off for the best part of a week. Tend to watch series/programmes on a TV elsewhere in the house, Try to keep the ‘movie night feel about the room and movies themselves so it feels special. Probably sounds weird but it works for us.

Long winded response but yes it was in similar conditions. If they want access to logs etc then happy to help (not sure if they are held for long, if at all as we are still relatively new at this despite having filled one terra and waiting on another. Delivery times seem extended and still waiting for a date. :)
 
Okay, thanks for that. Would you just drop me a quick PM with your Terra serial number? (You can find it on the Settings->Components page in your system's browser interface.) And the date and time of the playback problem as well if you can remember. Our systems upload log information to our headend for just this sort of reason, so that will allow the engineers investigating the issue to check your logs to see if they looked similar to mine.

Thanks!
 
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