i’ve been tinkering with the home network trying to figure out why i’ve been having issues with the media server. everything seemed to be working decently for a while, but recently, i’ve been getting stuttering or pausing video.

at first i thought the issue was related to me trying to get the NAS to just do too much. i tried to nice the processes, but that didn’t seem to help. i tried to remove services and that didn’t help, either.

i tried different UPnP servers, but still the problem was just as bad. the default UPnP server puts too much of a load on the server, but mediatomb seems to run at a reasonable load. i think the root cause of my problem was actually because the wireless network was failing and couldn’t handle keeping up with the constant stream. i’ve put the NAS and the PS3 on a switch and things are looking better so far.

what i have been running into is video stopping at the same place in the same file, but not at the same place across files. i actually suspect that it has to do with how the file was encoded, but i’m not curious enough to reencode the files myself to verify this. i just have to groan, fast forward through the bad part and start watching the rest of the file after that point. i hope a firmware update will fix this soon. it’s starting to get annoying.