OSX Boxee Box & SMB & UpNP Issues

**horvak** · December 5th, 2010, 06:18 AM

I have just installed (12th Dec) a Boxee Box on my wired network (using 85mb powerline ethernet) and I am experiencing a few issues. FYI I have a 24" Imac with Snow Leopard serving content from a 2Gb USB drive with two shares Movies & TvShows.

I run CCXStream on the Mac to serve content to XBMC using XBMS to two classic xboxes and I use Rivet to stream content to 2 Xbox360's and for the Boxee Box I have to use SAMBA shares. Prior to the Boxee everything was smooth running.

My experience so far is this. The samba sharing is slow...far to slow. Rivet crashes when Boxee looks at it, however I have just discovered an app called Playback which serves content via UpNP and is o far looking good.

My wife thinks I am a lunatic for dumping the classic XBOX, but as most of you will know it cannot play HD content due to the limitations of the hardware and the fans can be noisy. So on paper the Boxee seems like the perfect HTPC apart from I think that it should support the XBMS streaming protocol and allow the easy manipulation of the cache settings to allow for greater cache sizes.

My question is this, given my current set up, can I improve the throughput of the Samba shares via OSX or should I use a Windows virtual machine as I believe that the protocol is more efficient under Windows?

Is there a better UpNP app for OSX? I have used MediaLink and EyeConnect (both cause buffering) or do I wait for an update to fix the buffering on the Boxee and just tough it out. To date I have never seen a better combination of a modded XBOX and XBMC but I am hoping the Boxee Box eventually becomes that replacement.

**esch** · December 5th, 2010, 06:43 AM

two initial recommendations come to mind:
1. check whether you are using 10.6.5 OS, many users reported it resolves SMB related issues.
2. if you use any HW or SW that sends UPnP discovery while you SMB only should eb configured as OFF for UPnP discovery

**horvak** · December 6th, 2010, 12:49 PM

I am on the latest Snow Leopard 10.6.5. I have a mixture of Xbox360's etc in the house that rely on UpNP streamers for their content and my kids would be howling at the moon if I disable UpNP

**kenjisugahara** · December 6th, 2010, 05:29 PM

Apologies as this is a little bit outside the scope of what you're trying to do but I've found the following works the best for me.

For my setup I have an Airport Express base station. From there I have an 85 Mbps powerline unit hooked to our family room where I have a 10/100 switch. I have a NAS, Xbox 360, PS3 and the Boxee box hooked into that switch.

I have 2 NAS units. One (1) hooked into the Airport Express base station and one (2) hooked directly into that secondary switch. I found that when I accessed NAS 1, it was slow and caching took a while. When I accessed NAS 2, playback was nearly instantaneous. For me at least, it looks like the powerline is the choke point.

**dconti** · December 6th, 2010, 05:58 PM

i did a lot of testing with majestic on osx. it is definitely no frills.

buffering when playing back should be getting fixed in the next release.

as far as smb being slow is that for playback or for browsing shares?

cheers

**horvak** · December 7th, 2010, 03:59 AM

Hi Dan, browsing is fine but playback buffers. I am going to look into a NAS. I do have a similar set up in my main living room with a powerline adapter hooked into a switch and hanging from that I have an Xbox360, Classic Xbox (XBMC) and a PS3, etc. I am going to try hooking up the NAS drive to the switch and see what happens. I think the culprit is OSX and Samba sharing, I have tried tweaking my smb.conf file but to no real avail. I still think XBMS is the most efficient sharing/streaming that I have come across.

**horvak** · December 7th, 2010, 04:14 AM

Just a quick update, I added the NAS drive to the switch that is directly connected to the Boxee and there is no performance lags, so the powerline is the obvious candidate for the blockage. Thanks to Kenji for the tip.

**horvak** · December 7th, 2010, 07:24 AM

Another update: I have upgraded all of my powerline kit to 200mb and that has made a vast improvement and now I have media streaming all over the house at lightning speeds. I have also purchased a 2TB NAS drive that I am configuring and if it proves to be faster than my OSX/SAMBA/ external drive set up then I will sling all my media to the NAS device and use the external drive as a backup for the NAS

**horvak** · December 7th, 2010, 08:04 AM

More updates: I tried the NAS and it was noticeably slower, so I will be sticking with the 200mb powerline kit, and a USB connected hard drive to my iMAC. It seems that main issue was my network, but it took some real troubleshooting, it may be worth adding my experience to any troubleshooting FAQ's. We all have fairly different and yet similar setups and I would say in my case the pinch point was the network performance around my house.