Stress-testing the HDR-FOX

Black Hole

May contain traces of nut
Out of devilment (and prompted by a post in another topic), I decided to try beating my current record of five simultaneous HiDef streams to/from HDD.

I currently have three different HiDef recordings playing by DLNA, two HiDef recordings in progress, and a HiDef service on time-shift. All four "play" streams are performing OK, I need to check the recordings. Meanwhile the network bandwidth (in Sysmon) is about 15 megabits/sec, CPU utilisation is intermittently peaking around 80%, and HDD temperature is showing no significant excursion from a steady 50 deg.C (IIRC I have the fan running constantly, and it is a warm day!).
 
I have now added a HiDef playback by file share (using Splash Lite on my PC in a window - my PC is too slow to run full screen without being jerky)...

And now a fourth DLNA stream. There is another HD-FOX I could press into service but the TV is broken (probably needs an internal fuse - it's happened before), and I could break out the new HDR-FOX but again have nothing to connect it to. Short of installing an app on my iPad I'm out of options!
 
The recordings check out OK. Anybody gonna beat that (9 simultaneous HiDef streams to/from disk)?

The network bandwidth peaked at about 35 MiB/s, 30 sustained. Funnily enough, I got stutters on the Splash Lite stream only after I killed the recordings and was accessing the WebIF - DLNA continued fine, either because there was no contention on those routes or because the client has buffering to overcome temporary interruptions.
 
Not going to beat that! Seagate do claim "up to 16 simultaneous HD streams" for my disk but it's good to see some validation of the theoretical.
 
The GoodPlayer app for iPad supports DLNA streaming. I'm running an old version because I don't want to lose DTS and Dolby Digital sound support. This version can stream from the HDR Fox T2, I don't know about current versions.
 
I've installed VLC, but it doesn't work on my iPad 3 - even StDef grinds to a halt. Maybe there's a problem?
 
I've installed VLC, but it doesn't work on my iPad 3 - even StDef grinds to a halt. Maybe there's a problem?
I had an iPad 3, and found that I couldn't play HD recordings, but an iPad 4 had no problems.

The latest iPad Air, and iPad Mini with Retina display, are both happy playing decrypted HD recordings.
 
Yeah, I figured that - but what about StDef?
I don't do SD recordings on my Humax boxes, and don't even have SD channels tuned into them. All of my SD recordings are handled by my Topfield boxes, so perhaps Wallace will be able to answer that question.
 
What matters is whether an iPad3 should be able to run StDef.
I can recommend an upgrade to an iPad Air. I couldn't believe how much smaller and lighter it was compared to the 3rd generation, yet it still has the same size screen.
 
It's my birthday in a couple of weeks, if anybody wants a hint...

My current iPad functions well enough in the vast majority of "use cases" (ugh!), I have no need to stream video with it except to add another load to the HDR-FOX test. It works perfectly well running native video though, so I guess the problem must be in the codes for the streamed video.

The strange thing is that HiDef and StDef do more or less the same thing: play the first few frames and then stall (apparently for good). StDef goes a bit further than HiDef before stalling. This strikes me as something more than just being unable to keep up with the frame rate.
 
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