Last July, I downloaded a demo version of the Heresphere media player from a third-party platform. It played high-bitrate videos from my PC’s hard drive smoothly via SMB without any issues. However, after purchasing the full version of Heresphere from the Quest Store yesterday, I frequently experience stuttering when playing high-bitrate videos. The videos play smoothly for a few seconds or tens of seconds before freezing. Lower-bitrate videos play normally without stuttering, but fast-forwarding also causes stuttering. I don’t know how to solve this problem. Did the Heresphere developers make any changes during this period?
There are buffering settings for SMB in HereSphere that may help.
Did you get the Itch.io or Steam version originally?
I’m using the Quest version, and I’ve tried setting the SMB block size to 1, 8, or 10 (the default is 4), but it didn’t help. I also asked the author on dsicord and tried their method, but there was no improvement.
I understand you are using the Quest version now. Were you using the Quest version or PC version with the demo though?
What is the level of your WiFi router? You’ll really want at least WiFi 6 for high bit rate videos on the Quest.
Also, you mentioned a hard drive - do you videos still struggle if on SSD?
Do you have “enable scrubbing” turned off in the Herepshere settings?
Because the main router is separated from me by several walls, the Wi-Fi signal is weak. So, I connected the main router to my laptop via a wired connection, and then used my laptop’s wireless network card (an Intel AX201 network card that supports Wi-Fi 6) to create a hotspot. I then used Quect to connect to this hotspot. Previously, this method always worked smoothly for video playback.
Until I upgraded the media player from the demo version to the full version—I’m not even sure if that’s the cause—after that, high-bitrate videos started to stutter.
I tested my mechanical hard drive’s read/write speeds, and they were normal. I also tried storing the videos on an SSD, but the stuttering persisted.
This setting has always been enabled. I tried turning it on or off before playing videos, but it didn’t make any difference.
Bummer - was worth a shot :) turning it off helped me with stuttery 8k playback.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me. The problem now is that I can’t stream 8K videos smoothly except for those in JAVR, because JAVR generally has a low bitrate.
OK, so you’ve eliminated the drive throughput if the SSD didn’t help.
Doing a direct connection for wifi to your laptop should resolve wireless bandwidth issues.
Have you tried going back to the Itch.io demo version? That’ll at least tell you if there really is a difference between the paid and free version.
It seems the slow SMB transmission rate was caused by an extra forwarding of data packets at the router. So I tried a different solution: I changed the IP address of the wired Ethernet connection to be on the same network segment as the main router’s WLAN. This resolved the high-bitrate video stuttering issue.
Previously, the Ethernet and main router WLAN were on different network segments, and I didn’t have this problem. So it’s probably Microsoft’s doing. I remember my computer was forced to update Windows a few days ago, and besides that and buying a paid version of Heresphere, I hadn’t made any other changes.