Android TV 1 (very) poor Network performance

[nicogri]

Hi guys,

just a new thread to tell you guys how I am disappointed (sort of) with my new Android TV from Sony KD65XD9305.


I just bought this TV with a pretty great discount (2000€) and picture quality is very good.


For Android TV, I find it stable and fine. The main reason I chose Sony was for Android TV (I didn't wanted WebOS or Tizen).


So as I use the TV ONLY with network stored media, I plugged the Ethernet cable to get something reliable and fast...


HORROR !!! Ethernet port is not Gigabit... Sony are you kidding me ??? How do you plan to stream 4K HDR content to the TV with 100 Mb link ???


Let's do some math : Movie 2h00 / 63 GB = 64512MB to send to TV in 2 Hr so / 7200 = 9 Mb /s we are pretty close of the max we can output on 100mb network so as the bitrate is variable and some actions scene require much more of it you get bad picture lag and audio drop in half of the movie.

To confirm that it was not decoding problem, I putted the file on an external HDD plugged directly into the TV and had no problem at all.

So I wrote you a mail Sony, to explain that to you... 1 week later I got a person with no knowledge whatever who told me that I needed to run a speedtest because it was my internet (WAN) connection that was slow.

Just LOL ^^

I told myself that I was doomed.

So I search again and discovered that the Onboard wifi was 5 Ghz AC compatible. Maybe a way out.

So I droped my Cisco Meraki 300N Wifi and I got a TPLink Archer C7 C1750 (so it meens 900 Mb theorical on AC 5 Ghz)

It could have solved my bandwith problem on local network !!!

And guess what... it didn't because I think wifi chip or driver or ??? is total crap...

The TV is at less than 1 meter of the access point (no wall...), connected at 5 Ghz and I can't get download bandwith to a minimum of 100 Mb (a joke).

If I do the same test from the same spot with the same app at the same time on the same wifi of the same network with my phone (Google Nexus 6P) I get approx 230 mb of bandwith.

Screen cap are just at the bottom

What do you want to answer to that ???

So your Smart TV of 2016 is just to slow to play a 4k movie of 2016 (I tried Mad Max and Deadpool) on local network (no matter how good network connection is, I have full gigabit network at home).

So now my very precise question : Do you plan to adress this problem Seriously upgrading Wifi driver / firmware to get real fast connexion (as I am sure you cannot upgrade wired card to gigabit with software upgrade) ?

I am available if you need more statistics and / or informations with the test environment.

[ssbarnea]

I found a solution: since I got the Apple TV 4K which does 4K HDR upscaling very well, I am using Bravia exclusively as an dump-display and with last update it finally seems stable. No more need for fancy Sony upscaking features, Apple TV does them for me, much better and more stable (probably Roku and similar solutions will do). In fact is better to decouple the smart part from the display. If one gets broken or outdated, you replace only one of them.

Clearly my next TV is not going to be a Sony one as I will try to find one with as little software as possible. I am alose closing my "sony community" account. Somehow Sony managed to make as hard as possible to use even the forum: asking for your country each time you visit, introducing a perverse captcha in the login,...  You should read the email I got from their support when I complained about the annoying country picker, shortly "they cannot do it". Yep, the only thing that came into my ming was "*****!".

[fsony2018]

same here!

Had to register a second account to use the forum.

They ban if you hate them

[honey_pablo2]

HI,

I read this thread with interest having just bought a Sony AF8 65" OLED.

It of course also has a 100mbit LAN port (as I believe all sets do,  even the 2019 models) - intially this seems like a big oversight,  however I guess the majority of people are only streaming over the web at a maximum of 20-30mbps for h.265 4k so maybe it's a bit of a corner case that a few people also want to play rips off a local network at high bitrates.

I have been using Universal Media Server for years and straight away with the built in video app it would stall out on complex scenes on the largest Rips (approx 70GB).

I copied the files to a USB drive and they play perfectly - so the tv decoder can handle the bitrate spikes.

I contemplated all the work arounds mentioned in this thread,  usb ethernet,  usb stick simulation (there is a Raspberry Pi project that does this with a few limitaitons).

I was resigned to having to buy a Nvidia Shield,  however today I have hit on a combination that appears to work for my needs.

Mac Mini running Plex,  with DLNA enabled,  libraray on an external usb drive.

TV has Kodi 18.2 installed,  the massive benefit is that Kodi has a read ahead buffer and that seems to smooth out the bumps and the files that previously stalled are playing with 0 dropped frames.

Plug in a keyboard and hit ctrl + shift + O and you can see playback stats including forward buffer,  mine hovers around 7.5MB and nearly goes to zero on a fast scene - but doesn't drop.   I understand it's possible to increase this buffer too but i haven't had the need yet.

Obviously if you have a huge rip this probably won't work,  but for content that's marginal it's working well.  The jellyfish test clips with a sustained 140mbps clearly won't play,  but these are high CBR and my assumption is in actual movies you'd only get a very short VBR spike to this bitrate which the buffer can deal with.

The largest files I've seen are 70GB,  at 100mbps with a 10% overhead allowance that would take 1hr 45min to transfer.   So my conclusion is this is only going to be an issue with files >70GB and run time of <105mins - a pretty unlikely and rare situation.

Conclusion - I wish they'd have fitted a 1gbps NIC port,  but i don't think it's going to cause me any issues in reality.

Hope that helps someone.

P.

[sergio_sch]

Hey @honey_pablo2 , thanks for posting your research!

I lost so many hours in the past, researching and testing things, I had lost totally faith in Sony. 

The problem is not that 100 Mbit ethernet or 300 Mbit wifi is not enough, it should be enough, the problem is the bottleneck that hardware develops when performing LAN read plus playing the stream, it kills the perfomance causing stuttering.

I sometimes was able to play 50 GB files with stock video app or with Kodi, and sometimes I could not even a 30 GB or less. I found that disabling motionflow setting or fresh reboot sometimes have the extra perfomance needed to hold stream stable without stutters, but sometimes it was just impossible.

USB has always been fine.

As I said I had lost the faith long time ago, but with recent firmware update and with your post, I got a little hype to retry some more research, and oh my God, I can't believe but I think I have found a magic formula.

Sideloading the latest build from Kodi 18.2 ARMv7 test builds, I have AC3 plus DTS pass through without garbage noise at any moment.

And as you recommended, with Plex media server direct playing to Kodi+Plex add-on, stream plays without stutters and seem to keep perfomance up enough.

So I can only thank you, your message triggered this last effort which solved one of my first world problems

[honey_pablo2]

No problem @sergio_sch - happy it helped!

For what it's worth, I've actually gone back to Universal Media Server, it works just as well as Plex Server.

It's clear that even thought it's really small the forward buffer that the Kodi (and Plex) Player has is enough to make all real life rips work - I've tested 20+ movies in the 30-80GB range now and they all play perfectly.  Makes you wonder why the 'standard' Android player doesn't have this feature!

P.

[Zat0ichi]

I got the KD55XF9005 at a bargain price knowing the software was going to be wonky. When I found out about the networking bandwidth I was sore.

Thankfully my old plasma based setup was not smart so I had invested in a chromecast ultra.

All hail the ethernet dongle!. Enough for direct play 4k files through plex.

[John_Ratcliffe]

Spot on total rubbish!

constantly buffering 🤬