Universal Media Server | Forum

Hi,

Get consistent brief, 1-3 second pauses / freezes when playing video. When it resumes (automatically), it appears to output the video faster to make up for the time paused.

Some videos this doesn't seem to occur at all but some videos it's really bad and will freeze few times every minute of playback. This particular 720p playback attached the freezing was very bad. Didn't seem to happen on large 1080p files but it might've just been lucky.

Mostly default settings after clean install but problem seems to have persisted for a while and may have been started after CPU upgrade, router change, or other potential hardware related issue but just guessing.

Thank you

Stuttering like you describe usually means the transcoding cannot keep up or there is not enough network bandwidth which causes the player to wait for data.
You have a more than capable system to handle this and your newtork speed is 54mb/s which should be good enough for 720p video.

I can see that UMS is using mencoder instead of ffmpeg to transcode that file.
I think this was because mencoder had better subtitle support in the past so any problematic videos with subtitles were transcoded using mencoder instead.
It may be mencoder is not as efficient in filesize when transcoding so uses up a lot of network bandwidth.

There is a setting to turn this off called "Defer to MEncoder when transcoding problematic subtitles" in the "FFmpeg video" section in transcoding settings.

There was one message that looks strange to me. I don't know if that is causing any problems.