Asus RT-AC66U vs. XBox 360 S

Troubleshoot and discuss the XBOX 360, XBOX One, Linksys, and other extenders.
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jziggity

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Asus RT-AC66U vs. XBox 360 S

#1

Post by jziggity » Sun Nov 06, 2016 4:51 pm

I'm going to throw this scenario out to the group here in hopes of a solution, although I think I know where this is going:

Late last week my former router just up and died (Asus RT-N66U). No lights, nothing, just totally dead in the water. Since it makes up the backbone of my home network, and thus my DVR system (HTPC with Win7 and 4 XBox 360 S as extenders), I needed to replace it ASAP. I bought an Asus RT-AC66U off the shelf from Best Buy, as the now dead Asus router played pretty well with everything on my network. I have cat6 ethernet cabling run throughout the house. Everything runs through a DLink 24 port gigabit switch. The NIC on the HTPC is a Realtek gigabit built in to the motherboard.

With the new router in hand, I hooked everything up, set up all wireless networks again, etc. etc. No problems, until last night. The Mrs. wants to watch one of the recorded movies from the Hallmark Channel. It keeps freezing/locking up on her when watching through the XBox extender. Mind you, all XBox's are connected via ethernet. The one in particular she was trying to watch it on was connected directly to the new router, not through the switch. About 20-30 seconds into starting playback, the "Network Issue" warning box would pop up, followed by pixilation in the video, followed by video freezing, followed by audio dropout. I reset the router, the XBox, the switch, and the HTPC. I could reproduce the problem exactly as described above, every single time.

If I stopped the playback and hit play again, right on cue 20-30 seconds in, Network Issue warning pops up, followed by all of the rest. It's like there is a buffer somewhere that is overflowing and it falls to crap after that. The movie itself was recorded before the old router died. I can watch live TV on this same channel without any issues. I ran the Network Tuner on the XBox and the bar graph is pegged as high as it will go. I ran every other network test on the XBox and everything passed. I can watch this same recorded movie on the HTPC itself with no issues. I can attempt to watch it on a different XBox, one that is wired through the switch, and get the same Network Issue warning and video/audio breakup and freezing. I can watch other shows recorded on my HTPC on any of the XBox's just fine, without any issues. Other movies recorded from the Hallmark Channel however do have the problem. Mind you, everything was working fine with the old Asus router.

I played around with every network setting I could find on the new router admin page. Upnp, NAT, all sorts of things. Nothing I did made a difference. A few changes made things worse, so I changed them back. My only logical conclusion at this point is that this particular brand/model of router will not play nice with my home network in this very specific instance. My goal is to pick up a different brand of router (looking at one of the Netgear Nighthawk ones) and try that to see if that solves the problem.

To me, everything above points to a network issue with the router. No other hardware has changed other than the router. I can't find any other setting on the new router that fixes this. My apologies if this thread is better suited to the networking section, but I figured I would try here first.

Any thoughts/ideas are welcome. Thanks!

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Scallica

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#2

Post by Scallica » Sun Nov 06, 2016 5:28 pm

D-Link is junk. I would invest in a better switch.

Also, as a test, unplug the new router temporarily and try to play the recording on the Xbox 360. If the issue still occurs, then you know it's not caused by the router.
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jziggity

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#3

Post by jziggity » Sun Nov 06, 2016 5:51 pm

I'm not sure I follow the "unplug the router" suggestion. Everything I have feeds through it. The switch is connected to one of the ports on the back of the router. If I kill power to the router, that kills all of my network traffic throughout the house, no?

I have heard that DLink hardware can be sub-par, but I replaced my previous DLink 8 port switch with the 24 port one only because I needed more capacity, not because it went bad or anything. And everything was working just fine with the old Asus router.

I do have a 10 year old Belkin wireless G router that I can try yet. It was my stand in for a couple of days until I could run out to buy the new Asus. But it's only wireless G, and for some reason that old Belkin router would not work with my 2 HDHR Primes, which are the only tuners I have, so that was not a viable solution either. I will try that when I get home later.

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#4

Post by STC » Sun Nov 06, 2016 7:15 pm

Check if anything is blasting broadcast packets around. Turn off UPnP if on. Listen in with WireShark.
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Want decent guide data back? Check out EPG123

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#5

Post by Scallica » Sun Nov 06, 2016 8:21 pm

jziggity wrote:I'm not sure I follow the "unplug the router" suggestion. Everything I have feeds through it. The switch is connected to one of the ports on the back of the router. If I kill power to the router, that kills all of my network traffic throughout the house, no?
The golden rule is, don't use your router as a switch, use it as a router. My line of thinking was the process of elimination; take the router out of the equation. In the interest of testing, is it possible to temporarily connect all of your devices to the switch?
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#6

Post by DrSmith » Sun Nov 06, 2016 9:08 pm

What version of firmware are you running on the new AC66U? Is it the same as the version you were running on the original N66U (same version era of course, not same identical image)? Did you update the firmware after installing?

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#7

Post by newfiend » Sun Nov 06, 2016 10:35 pm

I have the same router (RT-AC66R) vs. your 66U (same insides) .. Check Asus website for the latest Firmware and make sure that's installed. I don't have these issues with mine at all and I have 3 360's running over powerline adapters in my house without issues.

The latest FW avialble for that router is version 3.0.0.4.380.4005

Available here: https://www.asus.com/us/Networking/RTAC ... _Download/

newfiend~

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#8

Post by jziggity » Sun Nov 06, 2016 11:35 pm

I just double-checked the firmware on the AC66U, and it IS the most recent one. I updated it right out of the box. I have been messing around with it some more, including trying out the vintage Belkin router again. The problem is still present, even after the route swap out. I tried changing to a different (albeit still DLink) switch I had on hand, still no difference. I powered off the router and made a check just running off of the switch, problem still there.

Unfortunately I am not familiar with Wireshark at all, so while it may help me out in this situation, I have no idea what I'm doing there. I could probably read through a few tutorials, but I'm looking to isolate the issue at this point. I thought it was the new Asus router, but swapping that out with a much older one didn't fix it. I swapped out the switch, and it still persists. The problem is present across multiple XBox's.

Is it possible there is a problem with the NIC on the HTPC? I'm trying to think of any other common elements that would be causing this, and that's my latest thought on it. My setup has been solid for years, and now.... Arrgghh!!

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#9

Post by Space » Sun Nov 06, 2016 11:41 pm

Maybe a bad cable?

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#10

Post by jziggity » Sun Nov 06, 2016 11:53 pm

I just remembered, when I swapped out the dead Asus router, I was having problems with internet access on the HTPC, as I screwed up the manual IP address assignment for that machine. To fix that issue, I deleted the adapter and then reinstalled it under windows. Thus all of the NIC settings on the HTPC were reset when it was reloaded. I'm thinking at this point it is highly probable that there is a setting that needs to be changed in the properties of the NIC? That would make sense, I would think, as I have changed out all of this other hardware and nothing has helped.

Now, what setting should I mess with? There are so many....

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#11

Post by jziggity » Mon Nov 07, 2016 2:31 am

I think I'm just going to call it a night on this one. The particular recording that I have which has had issues continues to have problems no matter what I do, but yet there are plenty of other recordings that work just fine. I updated the driver for the Realtek NIC on the HTPC, and while I was on their website I also downloaded their Ethernet Diagnostic Utility. That program has been helpful, as it allows me to see the throughput of the NIC in real time.

When I played back the problematic recording, I could see the throughput shoot up to 85-95Mbps as soon as playback began, and then it dropped way down a few seconds later. And then when the data that was buffered onto the XBox ran out, the freezing stuff began. Throughput would take forever to recover, and it would take even longer for the frozen picture to catch up.

I was running the utility while also running the Network Tuner app on the XBox inside WMC. From there I could see when the network bandwidth meter was pegged, the XBox was pulling right around 30Mbps through my NIC consistently. That seems correct to me, as the network port on the XBox is only 100Mpbs anyway.

So, with the XBox being flooded immediately with data upon playback of this particular recording, it's not that surprising that everything locks up. There's no way for the XBox to handle that much data all at once given its 100Mbps network adapter limitation, including overhead and stuff like that. At least that's what I'm getting from all of this.

So unless I continue to have this issue again on other recordings or live TV, I guess I'm not going to sweat it. If the Mrs. REALLY wants to see this one particular program, I guess she can watch it on the HTPC itself. It seems like all of my hardware is fine at this point. If some other development comes along that may help others in the future, I will post here. Thanks everyone for their input!

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#12

Post by choliscott » Tue Nov 08, 2016 6:09 am

By chance, did you try unplugging /plugging back in the electrical cord for the switch ?

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#13

Post by jziggity » Thu Nov 10, 2016 6:29 pm

I power cycled everything, multiple times, to include the switch, router, XBox's and PC. I have been searching for other channels that have this issue, and thus far it is only the Hallmark channel, and only on playback of recorded content on an extender. Live TV on XBox or PC works just fine, and playback of recorded content on the PC works just fine. It IS a channel encrypted by DRM. However I haven't found any other DRM channels that have this problem (yet). I can watch the outgoing and incoming throughput on the HTPC's network card via a Realtek utility program. From that program I can see that on playback of a recorded show from Hallmark channel, the HTPC is sending out data at a 90Mbps or so rate immediately on playback, and then it drops off dramatically after the first ten seconds or so. A short time after that the video freezes on the XBox, along with the audio shortly after that. Sometimes I get the "Network Issue" warning box, other times I don't. Playback of recordings from other channels do not show data rates anywhere near that high.

What is really baffling for me is the repeatable nature of this issue on just this one channel. If it weren't for the fact that everything was working fine (including playback of the Hallmark channel) prior to my original router going belly up, I would think it was an issue with the way TWC is encrypting that one particular channel. Now I really think something got messed up when I deleted and reinstalled my network card in Windows during the router replacement. I just can't figure out what is messing with this one channel yet.

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#14

Post by mcewinter » Thu Nov 10, 2016 9:10 pm

jziggity wrote:I just remembered, when I swapped out the dead Asus router, I was having problems with internet access on the HTPC, as I screwed up the manual IP address assignment for that machine. To fix that issue, I deleted the adapter and then reinstalled it under windows. Thus all of the NIC settings on the HTPC were reset when it was reloaded. I'm thinking at this point it is highly probable that there is a setting that needs to be changed in the properties of the NIC? That would make sense, I would think, as I have changed out all of this other hardware and nothing has helped.

Now, what setting should I mess with? There are so many....
Roll back (system restore) to the day that you messed with that driver.

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#15

Post by jziggity » Fri Nov 11, 2016 2:23 am

I did attempt the roll-back (system restore) option a couple of days ago, to a date just prior to everything messing up, and still had the issue. I attempted a recording on the other Hallmark channel tonight (I get two different ones, right next to each other in the lineup), and it worked just fine, go figure!! I even disabled the built-in network adapter on my computer and tried a USB ethernet adapter, and still had the problem.

It seems like I've effectively eliminated all of my hardware as the problem...? Is it possible that there is something in the way the copy protection is implemented on this one channel from TWC that just doesn't play nice with an extender setup? And since the play back works just fine on the HTPC itself, I'm, going to say it's not a signal issue or problem with my tuner hardware (HDHR Primes).

I think this issue would make a great case study for someone really into the nuts and bolts of networking.

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#16

Post by jziggity » Tue Nov 29, 2016 4:33 am

RESOLVED:

Wow, after trying everything hardware related and being thoroughly convinced that's what it was, at the end of the day it was actually a software problem, specifically the free version of ZoneAlarm firewall. I have been running that on the HTPC since late 2012 without too many issues. But I figured, what the hell, why not just completely uninstall it and see what happens. It just mostly gets in the way anyway. So I did, and the problem on the Hallmark channel with streaming recordings to extenders went away! I have been playing a recorded movie for several minutes now and there are no issues!! :D

I can also see via the Realtek diagnostic utility that the streaming rate to the extender is a steady and much more reasonable ~10Mbps. I was never really sure if the data rate through the network card was a symptom or the actual problem itself, but in any case it appears ZoneAlarm was definitely the cause. I have no idea what suddenly changed to cause this all to act up, but I'm just glad it is fixed. Thanks to everyone who chipped in with suggestions!

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