Ogg playback - rebuffering, choppy, dropouts

[logicology]

I've been searching these forums for a few hours and it seems that others have this problem, but I haven't found a real solution yet.

I have SC 7.1 installed via SSOTS on a QNAP TS209. Everything plays perfectly except for ogg files. They are choppy, never play for more than 5 seconds, and "rebuffer" constantly.

I remember in a previous installation I had to change something in the "File Types" menu. I've been playing with various options in there and nothing is working. I am also very confused about how this page is orgnized or what the changes actually mean. I tried disabling the Native ogg decoder by changing the OGG Vorbis entry to look like this:


Ogg Vorbis AIFF Disabled
FLAC sox/flac
MP3 sox/lame
Ogg Vorbis Disabled

Don't know if that is right, but it does not make any difference. I am pretty sure I have sox installed. But I'm not sure how to check that, or how to install it on the TS209.

Can someone give me any clues as to what I need to do to fix this?

In the serverlog, I see his error a often when playing oggs:

0068: Error writing mp3 output
0067: /volume1/SSODS/bin/sox sox: Error writing: Error writing sample file. You are probably out of disk space.
I can say with complete certaintly that I am not out of disk space. I probably have 200 GB free on this volume.

I am connected via wired ethernet.

Thaks everyone!

[CatBus]

Lots of possible explanations. First off, there are a lot of Ogg Vorbis files out there that were encoded before the semblance of a Vorbis specification existed. If they actually play, it's pure luck. So first things first, what encoder was used? If you don't know, what does ogginfo tell you about the file?

What's the bitrate of these files? Any idea?

Here's what the Filetypes menu does. When you disable native Ogg playback, you're telling your server to convert the Oggs into something else before streaming them to the SB3. The other options (FLAC/MP3/AIFF) just specify WHICH format your server should try to stream to the SB3 instead.

An SB3 will be able to decode most normal Ogg files natively, so under most circumstances you should enable native Ogg playback. When your Ogg file is abnormal in some way (weird encoder, extremely high bitrate), you may need a more full-featured decoder (like sox), which would have to reside on the server. The problem is that decoding (and then re-encoding) on the server in realtime can overwhelm the small CPU on most NAS devices. So while it can decode the file, it can't do it fast enough to keep up with the audio playback.

There's also a fairly minor issue (bug, targeted to be fixed in 7.3) where you can't get synchronized playback working among multiple classes of device (SB3's and Transporters, for example) while using native Ogg decoding. So if that's a concern you HAVE to disable native decoding.

Hope that helps. I suspect your Ogg files may just be unusual enough to need a full-featured decoder (not possible in the SB3 firmware), and your NAS is not beefy enough to decode them in realtime. Something's gotta give--if this is the case, I'd just convert the Ogg files to FLAC and be done with it.

[logicology]

Hope that helps. I suspect your Ogg files may just be unusual enough to need a full-featured decoder (not possible in the SB3 firmware), and your NAS is not beefy enough to decode them in realtime. Something's gotta give--if this is the case, I'd just convert the Ogg files to FLAC and be done with it.

Thanks for the concise explanation and advise. I didn't want to have to convert all my oggs, but I guess I'll load up MediaCoder and get a batch going tonight.