Does bitrate matter?

[sterankin]

I am trying to play a video I mad eon a GoPro 4k which I editing in iMovie and exported as a MP4 file.

The video is on a NAS and I am trying to stream on my Samsung tv through Wifi (which gets like 70+MB to the public internet).

The video pauses and looks like a buffering issue. However the video is only 500MB. I can play other files (like 20GB) from my NAS without issue.

Here is some info about the file:

Format: H.264
Resolution: 3840 x 2160, 16:9
FPS: 25
Data size: 497.4 MB
Bitrate: 28.41 Mbit/s

Is there something about this video file which is causing the choppiness?

[davexnet]

It could be the bitrate. Have you successfully streamed *any* video approaching this ~ 30 mbps ?

[sterankin]

Not that I know of, I tried another movie file where the source is an edited version of a GoPro video and its the same issue.

Should the bitrate be reduced somehow?

Is there a way to determine the limit of my network? My wd network drive is attached direct to my gaming Asus router.

I recently bought another Asus gaming router which acts as a mesh network using aimesh. I was really hoping it would help. I have a decent connection to the WiFi pulling in 70+ mb doing in internet speed test with fast.com.

I'm not sure why the internal network would be slower or is there anything I could try

[super8rescue]

put it on a usb stick and plug it in your tv set. forget the network.

[LigH.de]

Well, some cheap USB sticks have a pretty limited read speed as well. You might be surprised: USB sticks with read speeds below 10 Mbps do exist, still. Fortunately, most USB 3 devices are faster.

Commercial video playback technologies (e.g. DVD Video, Blu-ray) have specifications mentioning a limit of bitrate caused by the read speed of the media, and the limited capacity of the playback buffer in consumer players has an impact as well (they don't have Gigabytes of RAM like a PC). Authoring tools need to check that the average bitrate of the playback data during a certain amount of time (usually a GOP) does not exceed such a limit, using a "Video Buffer Verifier" (VBV) during the authoring process.

The same applies for transfers of video via a network with limited bandwidth. A quirk of the ethernet protocols here: Even though many devices may have a capacity of 100 or even 1000 Mbps, hubs/switches may limit themselves to the lowest supported capacity of all connected devices, and if one has only 10 Mbps, all transfer (or that of some routes) may be limited to 10 Mbps.

[johnmeyer]

1. 30 mbps is definitely high enough to cause problems.

2. WiFi has problems streaming high bitrates, even if the WiFi bandwidth is higher than the bitrate. That is because, even at close range, WiFi has a lot of retries. If you can establish a wired connection between your NAS and the device which decodes the video, you can probably get a smooth result.

3. You cannot reduce the bitrate without re-encoding the entire video.

4. Your resolution (4K) is also an issue. It doesn't make any difference to the transmission issue mentioned above, but it will increase the CPU horsepower needed to decode.

Have you looked at the specs for your Samsung TV? The user manual usually includes a table which shows what bitrate, resolution, encoding format, and container that it will support. According to this information:

https://www.samsung.com/nz/support/tv-audio-video/play-usb-on-tv/

it does look like modern Samsung TV sets can support your specs, but if your TV is more than a few years old, it may not.