Our 9 year old LG TV - never a problem - has some "smart features". Being able to play media from USB (sticks, drives) and via DNLA are the most useful.
Annoyingly the powerline connection to my media box has slowly been made problematic with the increasing size of modern media files.
Up until now I have worked around the problem by copying media to a USB stick and playing via the TVs input.
However, last night, even that started causing problems - stuttering, the TV "jamming" (just hanging and not responding to remote commands).
This was a 3.3Gb file for 1:12:00 playtime.
Now surely even the most basic and cheap USB stick (this is a Sandisk) could support the speeds needed for HD playback at that density ? c.
100kb/s ?
I find myself wondering if the heat could have messed things up ?
We don't watch anything beyond HD as SWMBO doesn't benefit from the resolution.
Fra\nkly I am giving up on TVS as anythiug but HDMI equipped monitors with PCs in the front of them., They seem to be able to do that, anything internet is simply beyond them
First of all, that's perfectly normal. DVD rates might be down around the 2MB/sec level or so.
For a fast USB stick, try "Sandisk Extreme Pro", not "Sandisk Ultra" which is not Ultra by any stretch. If you had a Walmart, it would only have Sandisk Ultra, which you do not want. The Walmart stocks "everything you do not want to own" :-) That's how that works. A proper computer store will have the Extreme Pro.
Stock?
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Slower, but stock available. Availability is not that easy to predict. Still good. Name change from Extreme Go to Extreme Pro or something, while keeping same SKU.
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The Pro connector is USB3, but both USB3 and USB2 rates are supported. It would plug into a TV set. At USB3, it reads at 200MB/sec. At USB2, it reads at peak USB2 bus rate, which is 30-35MB/sec. The material being played back on TV, is only requested at 2MB/sec. There are some AVC formats that play at higher speed, but would be 4K material as well. If the TV set has a USB3 connector, you know it supports the whizzy stuff.
Yes, it's quite possible for USB2 sticks, to drop to 1MB/sec on read, and this happens a day or two before they fail completely :-) (I had a couple regular USB3 sticks do that.)
Kingston makes a USB3.2 Rev2 stick (not a 2x2), that runs at
700MB/sec when benchmarked. It is wider than a regular stick and bumps into stuff. Being USB-C on the connector, lots of old kit will not be plug and play. That's why I am pushing the Sandisk Extreme Pro, as it has a Type A connector, suited to more old equipment. TV sets never seem to have good USB.
The Sandisk Extreme Pro (several versions), should manage to write at 100MB/sec and read at 200MB/sec. Some go faster than that, but may currently be out of stock.
SDCZ80-032G USB3 port 180MB/sec read (measured) USB2 port 37MB/sec read (measured - likely UASP, TV is not UASP)
SDCZ800-064G USB3 port 155MB/sec read (measured) Writes ~100 or so.
SDCZ880-128G-G46 USB3 400MB/sec estimated (no stock, design is a couple years old) (not even an advert at my shop)
That Kingston I mentioned, appears to be a paper-launch here, as both the big and small one are "out of stock". Having the advert for them is just a waste of time, unless they have stock. No, I won't be buying one -- only one of my PCs here has the USB-C connector so far. My USB3.2 add-on card didn't even have a USB-C connector.
The problem with stuff like Sandisk Ultra, is write speed. Takes a while to fill. Still fast enough for TV set reads, but is an annoying product otherwise. Even the LED pattern on those is annoying.
I have several Lexar ones here that would rate a "don't bother".
Since USB sticks are built to a price point, it's simply not possible for the "USB fleet" to impress. They have to suck. It's a requirement.
The Kingston stick just became available with a Type A connector, so the absurdly fast USB-C flash drive now has a Type A brother. Won't be in stores quite yet.
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It'll probably be months before that appears at my local store.
It draws 2.41W of power, which the TV set 2.5W can provide (5V @ 500mA). Since the data rate on a USB2 TV is so low, there won't be a speed component to the power, just idling power in the PHY and such.
So that's to show what the top end of the market can provide. 700MB/sec.
What is the speed of the usb in the set? My experience though is that successive updates to firmware tends to slow the computer inside down or makes it use more Ram as a buffer with the symptoms you describe, and worse, like even direct connected internet buffers. MY Samsung is only just over a year old and its significantly slower than when new, the time it takes to announce menus and the glitching or cutting off is also worse, also the latest All four app is inaccessible on the TV now. Brian
It's certainly possible. 'Digital' electronics is actually analogue, just with a tolerance of a very low signal/noise ratio. The books show you perfect right-angle corners on digital waveforms, the truth is somewhat different.
I once repaired a digital video device in which someone had fitted an IC from the wrong manufacturer, causing considerable glitching. This was quite a while ago, only a 13MHz clock, but probably 18 inches of PCB trace length. The difference in IC input impedance (not normally specified for digital ICs) made a considerable change to the shape of the waveform, and therefore the timing. This sort of thing will vary with temperature, and it's possible that the recent temperatures have pushed compatibility between input and output levels and timings over the working limit.
Moved the memory stick to play via my DVD player, and it was 100% perfect.
Working theory is that the TV was decoding *and* displaying using the same circuitry. Splitting the task "solves" the issue.
Annoyingly I used to have a network media player - a Cyclone - that did the job. But when it packed up and a replacement looked hard (and now even harder) to source, I fell back on letting the TV do the work.
Not a biggie in the grand scale of things - generally I want my TV to just show what it's told. And the DVD player can act as a network media player, it's just a question of dealing with the interface. Which is gawdawful (Panasonic !).
This is why my next step will be to employ PC's instead of STBs to do internet and networked stuff.
The so called 'smart TV;s have browsers they are about 40 years behind the curve, and a user interface that somp0ly doesn't work.
In short all the TV has to do is be a sound and vision output device
the PC can have a decent user interface, it can record, it can play DVDs, it can get programs off air with a TV card, and it can play anything on a network it's connected to. All far better than a TV
On computers, video can be completely decoded by a video encode/decode block in the GPU. The GPU could be inside the processor (Intel QuickSync, AMD UVD), or in the video card GPU (NVidia Purevideo).
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ARM processors should have some sort of acceleration as well, to make it easier for a phone to play a video.
At one time, video decode acceleration consisted of IDCT support. Which is almost no help at all. It helped at the macroblock level, the blocks of pixels being manipulated in the frequency domain, to trade off file size and detail (softness).
Today, speed tradeoffs mean that using IDCT is useless, as the CPU can do discrete cosine transform without that kind of help.
But the above decoders do the whole job. You just DMA packets of video into the video SIP, and out comes raw pixmaps.
Similarly, the above can have video encoding, and can do single-pass H264 for example (at 330 FPS). Whereas on your desktop CPU, you can do two-pass encoding for best results (first pass is a bandwidth estimator pass, second pass does the encoding, using bandwidth estimates to estimate when it can make "even better looking" stretches of video).
Like most of the junk in the house, a TV could be from an older generation with CPU-only solution. Or it could be an ARM with a GPU block with some of those functions in it. If you can discover the "secret format" which causes low overhead on the TV CPU, then the playback could be smoother. But this might also cause a higher USB2 transfer rate to be needed, and larger files on the stick.
How you encode, can affect "controls flexibility". A video can be made more seek-able with bidirectional encoding, but that encoding might be less common. Some CODECs just aren't good for seeking at all, and attempts at going backwards can result in the video playing from zero again.
Your TV is an experimenters paradise, wasting hours to solve problems like this.
On the decoder table here, MPEG2 and H.264 might be examples of ones you would want accelerated. And part of the reason, is the number of sources in your house, that might use those formats. Like, the signal that comes down the TV antenna, can be converted directly into packets suited to one of these decoder-things. The only thing the hardware needs help with, is being told which stream number is the video and which stream number is the audio (as that can vary with broadcast material).
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This is incoming from my TV tuner card, giving some idea what a TV might be tuned for from a decoding perspective. I might have to tell my computer which streams (marked with arrows) to play.
[mpeg2video @ 0000000004901000] interlaced frame in progressive sequence, ignoring
If you transcoded your selection to MPEG2, maybe your TV would like that better. The video card on my PC, can process an hour of TV content, in six minutes (to make MPEG2).
If your transcode, happens to not match some automation the TV has, it might have to switch to CPU decoding. Like some CODECs have multiple "profiles", and the TV will hate some profiles enough, not to touch them.
Try and find an honest TV manual, with that level of detail...
Sometimes, the manufacturer provides a "list" of supported formats on some web page, but it might be devoid of preferred profile info. Making for an incomplete specification. It might include useless things like DIVX and XVID square aspect, then handle them improperly and circles are ellipses and so on.
My 5ish year old LG 43UJ670V plays just about anything from the ethernetted NAS using the native 'Photos and Videos' app. And it's quite a clean interface, bit like a file explorer. But it's quirky - can't select language on multitracked videos for example. For those I use the Plex app on the LG. I'd use Plex all the time but the updating is erratic - the native app updates in real time as I add files.
I only use the USB (SSD in a caddy) for live pausing etc and programmed recording from the guide - seems to work fine (in the sense it's never not worked).
As an aside, the whole thing has become very snappy since I replaced the NAS HDs with some enterprise 8TB 7200s. I'd always thought the TV was the limitation.
Not all TVs are created equal. Some of them don't even use a browser.
But even though I've worked on them I'm inclined to use them as a display only, and use a dedicated STB for decode etc. One day the one I have here will cease to handle streams well enough, and will get retired to display only.
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