Hi and a Happy New Year to everyone !
Just a heads up to a frustrating issue I was having since having to revert back to a home plug LAN setup temporarily from a direct Ethernet connection. I was having really bad, yet intermittent buffering issues on audio playback on my clients. As I have lots of DSPs running on the client PC, I immediately switched those off ... no change.
Now I know sometimes people get the "check your AV as a response to all problems" reply here and its not always what you want to hear
BUT in my case this is indeed what the issue was!
I know a lot of people here use Bit Defender so I thought I would share my Firewall config as it is not obvious and certainly not intuitive.
BD Firewall
1) Firewall
Settings Tab -- make sure your "Block port scans in network" is
OFF (note: this is only blocking port scans from within your local network, the firewall will still block external port scans (unless you allow them) -- your router should be doing this too). IMO you should also set it to NOT monitor your WIFI connections -- but should not have an effect.
2)
Rules Tab -- this might be overkill but at the very least it will avoid false positives for future updates of JRiver that BD might be slow in "allowing" them. Add a rule for each of these programs (found in the program x86 folder in Windows under JRiver) :
jrservice.exe; jrworker.exe; jrweb.exe; media center 21.exe should already be added automatically -- if not add the rule. Set rules to trusted and home office and allow everything.
3)
Adapters Tab -- set to Network Type:
Home/Office; Stealth Mode:
Remote; Generic:
OnBD AV
Now everyone should know this but just in case I recommend that in the AV section set scan mapped network drives to
disabled and if using UNC paths exclude your shared media paths. You can also exclude file extensions
on access (like *.flac, *.mkv set to YES) --- leaving the on demand set to NO to permit you to scan file downloads manually and run maintenance scans.
If you have a slow network or are streaming lots of big videos to clients and you have a slow network this should speed things up even if you have no buffering issues per se. Also this could speed things up if you use a lot of DSPs client side.
Hope this helps. If anyone want to add or correct my config to something better, please reply as this might change with updates to Bit Defender -- (I'm using Internet Security 2015/Win 10, for info)