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[adam6464]

I'm having issues with my 320.  I have 2 3tb Western Digital Red drives in the NAS, and setup as just regular individual volumes.  They are both full of movies and TV shows.  When I watch from either my Windows 7 laptop in any media player (wirelessly) or over Boxee Box (wired), it will play about 2 minutes of video, then stall for about 10 seconds.  The audio will continue and the video will speed up to catch up to the audio.  This happens with any video I watch, of any format, whether it's AVI, MPG, or MKV.  Is there anything I can do to correct this?

[JavaLawyer]

Are all your devices connected to the rear port of your router? Do you have a GB router?  What type of video are you streaming (e.g. BR, HD, etc.)?

If you have a switch I recommend connecting the DNS-320 and the Boxee Box directly to the switch and test streaming. This topography will eliminate issues related to your router or other devices.

[adam6464]

I have a Belkin N750.  The NAS is connected to the back of the router, as is a Seagate GoFlex Net media sharing device.  The seagate streams video fine, and it has mostly HD content on it.  The NAS has a mix of SD and HD files, all of which stutter.

[JavaLawyer]

The first (and simplest) thing to try is disconnecting the Ethernet cable from the rear of the GoFlex and plugging it into the DNS-320 to rule out a cable/port issue. We know the port/cable combination work for the GoFlex. It's possible for a poor/damaged cable to cause data transfer issues.

The next thing you'll want to try is disabling as many of the services/apps as you can in the DNS-320 (e.g. iTunes, NFS, UPnP, AFP, etc). Cumulatively, enabling many apps that are processing at the same time can slow things down.

Also, as I suggested earlier, placing the DNS-320 and Boxee Box on a dedicated switch will isolate the network traffic and remove the router as a potential bottleneck/cause for your throughput issues. This approach will also provide a dedicated data pipe between the DNS-320 and Boxee Box, freeing up more bandwidth for the rest of your network.

[adam6464]

I took your third suggestion first, as it was the simplest because I didn't even have to get up off my ass after reading your post, lol.  I disabled all the 4 services you listed, and after that, streaming an SD TV show to my laptop worked fine, so that's great!

I'll be trying an HD movie later on through Boxee Box and I'll let you know how it goes.  Thanks for your help, I was getting frustrated after having just upgraded to these new 3tb hard drives and filling them up, only to have this happen.

[adam6464]

Nope, I was wrong, the laptop froze again while I was streaming.  Funny enough, I realized it doesn't freeze if I copy files to the 320 at the same time.  I was moving other seasons of shows to it while I was watching an SD show, and it was fine.  When not copying files, it went back to stuttering every 3-4 minutes.

Boxee Box still stutters, so I'm looking at ordering a switch from ebay now.  I'll try the cable swap later on to see if that makes a difference, I'm still copying things over from the upgrade.

[adam6464]

I was out-of-town all week due to work, and I finally got back to try some things with the NAS.  I purchased a D-link switch and put it in the router, then plugged the Boxee Box and NAS into it.  Boxee no longer stutters with SD or HD videos at all, so that's fixed.  However, streaming SD video from the NAS to my laptop still stutters like before.  I say SD because I tried an HD MKV and it seemed to be fine.  The only thing is, the particular SD collection I was watching was copied over out-of-order with everything else.  I'm wondering if it got fragmented?  or do AVI and MKV files stream differently?  It's strange to me.  Is there a way to defrag the NAS volumes without removing the drives and hooking them up to a windows PC?