When I skip ahead in a DVR recording, its takes quite some time to skip ahead. Reducing the quality doesn’t seem to help. Live TV also suffers from poor playback. I have the 2015 Fire TV. Would upgrading to a newer FireTV solve the problem? Wired and Wireless both seems the same. DVR is synology DS216+II
The 2015 FireTV is more powerful than the newer one, so I don’t think upgrading would help.
How long does skipping take? And what kind of problems with live tv?
If you’re wired in it should be quite fast…
I think the problem is that it’s transcoding everything prior to sending to the firetv, and it’s doing it on demand.
- Would the Appletv be any better?
- The Fire TV doesnt seem to be very good at determining if there is a DVR on the network or not. I tried using a Windows machine rather than the NAS as the DVR to see if that helps.
- Is there a way I could easily convert files to a easier to stream format (.h264 or something)? Maybe MCE Buddy could do that? Would that help?
Do you see the DVR say it’s transcoding? It shouldn’t be if its on the same network and you’re connected locally…
I can see the CPU usage go up on NAS when I’m playing from it. I also see when playing on the web player, below the video, what looks like a indicator of how fast the trans coder is going. Is there an easy way to tell if it’s transcoding or just sending the video?
The file sizes of the recordings are quite large; several gigabytes. a half hour show I record is 2.5 GB. Works out to be about 1MB a second.
I’m used to half hour shows being 350MB or so; I know those are highly compressed, without commercials, but its a big difference.
For what it’s worth, I tried using the HDHomeRun Extend (with the internal transcoder) and it didn’t seem to have much impact.
The web player always transcodes.
When playing on the FireTV, load the DVR web UI and look at the Activity section on the Settings tab. It should say transcoding if its transcoding. Otherwise it will just say Watching.
Seems like you are correct, it did not say that it was trans-coding when I checked. I changed the Windows 10 DVR to use local storage rather than NAS to see if that would improve things, but I can’t get my fire TV app to find the DVR now.
Try unchecking and rechecking the Bonjour checkbox.
I didn’t realize you were using Windows as your DVR. Why not install the DVR software onto the NAS?
I tried it on the NAS already; trying to narrow down the performance problem.
Is it possible that the AppleTV app is better than Fire TV? I already bought the Fire TV one; I don’t want to spend another $25 if the problem remains.
Also, the skipping is pretty quick on the first 1 or 2 button presses, but its not as quick if I press skip several times in a row, or skip the detected commercial.
How long is the skip taking?
The AppleTV 4K has a gigabit Ethernet and very fast CPU, so skips are quite fast. What model do you have?
Sorry took a while to update you. Got the apple TV Beta all working. Working much better than the amazon fire TV app. I have the DVR running on the Synology, and its working nearly flawlessly! So impressed. I will give another update in a few weeks when I have had more time to play with it.
Is there a certain place you want me to leave beta feedback?