Blu-ray drive pauses read while streaming, restarts too late

[jonajona88]

Hi,
I am using MakeMKV (1.6.12) to stream to my PS3 directly from a blu-ray drive (LG BE12LU30) on Mac OS X 10.6.8. I was very impressed by how simple it was to set up and how well everything worked, but after a few minutes watching a blu-ray, streaming stopped for 30 seconds before restarting.
What seems to happen is:
1) MakeMKV fills the buffer. This takes about 30 seconds (read rate around 14-15M/s)
2) When buffer is full, reading stops. The blu-ray drive keeps spinning for a while (1 minute or so) then stops.
3) In the meantime, the buffer slowly empties.
4) By the time the buffer becomes empty, the BD drive has stopped spinning, and video stream stops as well.
5) After about 30 seconds, the drive restarts spinning and streaming restarts as well.

Is there a way to restart filling the buffer before it dries out?
I tried changing the buffer size from Auto to 2048 to no avail.

Thanks!
Jon

Details:
- The BD I'm reading is self-produced. You may wonder why I'm not reading it directly in the PS3 and want to stream it through an external BD drive on a Mac through the network... It turns out I've never been able to produce Blu-ray discs that the PS3 (Japanese version) accepts to read. The discs are not protected or anything like that, my guess is it's just Sony not letting me play self-made discs (but I'd be more than happy to learn about a way to avoid all this).
- I don't think there is any network speed issue. I am streaming through Moca ethernet, and there seems to be more than enough bandwidth.

[jonajona88]

A follow-up on the above issue: this also happens when simply streaming to VLC on the Mac itself.
Any idea?

[jonajona88]

Any insight on this issue?

I tried again today with MakeMKV v1.7.0 darwin(x86-release) streaming to VLC (Version 1.0.2 Goldeneye (Intel 64bit)) on my iMac (OS X 10.6., and the same problem occurs:
blu-ray drive spins, buffer fills up about 90%, then blu-ray drive stops and buffer starts emptying. When the buffer is empty, streaming stops for 20 seconds until the drive starts spinning again.

I'd be more than happy to purchase MakeMKV if this issue was fixed, as it would be the best way for me to watch home-made movies streamed on my TV.

[jonajona88]

Could someone with a similar setup at least give it a try to see if they have the same kind of issue?
It would be great if we could narrow down the problem (is it Mac only, LG blu-ray drive only, etc.).
Thanks.

[beniwtv]

For me the same happens, however, my player (XBMC) does not restart the stream, it times out before that.

Is there any option we could use to keep the drive busy?

[orsonb]

I usually don't stream blu-rays precisely because of this problem. It doesn't matter what disk I try.

I have tried 2 setups:
MacMini 2009 with a Buffalo blu-ray drive.
MacMini 2011 with a Buffalo blu-ray drive.

The latest MacMini has 16GB of ram. I would love to be able to set the buffer to use even 4GB of that.

[beniwtv]

I found out that (at least with my drive) if I set "-cache 40" it does no longer have that problem. However, if I "pause" the stream (via media player controls) this still happens as the cache obviously gets filled at some point.

[foobar]

I usually reduce the read speed of the drive to 1x when streaming DVD or blurays. Prevents the drive from spinning down, while reducing noise levels as well.

[jonajona88]

Thank you all for your feedback.
> beniwtv
Do you use the command line version of MakeMKV to make this setting?

> foobar

Is this a setting that can be performed inside MakeMKV or on the system side?

[foobar]

System side. On linux: "hdparm -E 1 /dev/cdrom" (need root). I'm sure there are other ways, including GUIs, to do the same thing though.