home network streaming issue; every media player crashes

JayElDee2 wrote:

A bit confused...even with the VPN uninstalled I had the problem occur

So to confirm, from earlier:

I uninstalled my VPN, rebooted, and tried again. This time everything worked. Living dangerously, I reinstalled the VPN…

[and everything broke, again, worse]

There are pieces of the VPN still installed.

Maybe the VPN vendor has a removal tool?

I’d likely get a backup, and reinstall this Mac, without migrating apps, and without adding VPNs.

I'm surprised no-one questioned this:

disk4 - Samsung PSSD T7 1.00 TB

External USB Up to 480 Mb/s USB

Your SSD drive is throttled by the (relatively) slow USB2 interface. While this wouldn't ordinarily cause crashes, it can lead to buffering, pauses, and other playback issues.

Might be worth trying:

1) copying the video file locally to the MacMini and playing it from there - would eliminate the network and the server as culprits

2) copying the video file to the internal hard drive of the server and streaming it from there - would eliminate the USB interface as the bottleneck/cause.

A 30-year old network cable could also be the problem. What's the distance of that cable run? Cat5e is only rated for 1000mbps up to 328 meters (1,000 ft).

Unfortunately, etrecheck doesn't report the ethernet link speed (@MrHoffman - any way to add that in?)

> That SSD is not being accessed, it is merely plugged into the mac mini. TBC, it is NOT the source of the video streaming.

Oh, my bad. Your original post stated:

> The videos are stored on an external drive connected to my desktop.

and that drive looked like the most likely candidate.

> But, it would seem that other services would also take a hit if the cable were going bad, though admittedly streaming video may be the most challenging, but is that more challenging than watching youtube videos or TV over YouTube TV?

Not necessarily. YouTube is optimized for low bitrates (something in the single digit mbps) whereas a local file would try to download as fast as possible (depending on the app and server config). Either way, certainly not apples-to-apples.

Two additional things to try if you're up for using the Terminal:

ifconfig -au

Look for your ethernet interface (likely listed as en1 or en2, but can vary widely depending on system configuration). Amongst other things should be a line like:

> media: autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,flow-control>)

Here you can see my ethernet link is up at 1000baseT (1gbps)

A second one to try would be:

netstat -i

Look for the same interface name that you saw in the ifconfig output and check the Ierrs and Oerrs columns which indicate the number of errors seen on the interface. Ideally they should be 0. If they're significantly non-zero then there's a problem with the interface or the cable.

I’d not usually update macOS for this case (yet), given zillions of people are playing media without issue.

VPNs can cause issues. As can media-related plugins.

After removing all VPNs and the plug-ins, I’d next reboot the Mac into Safe Mode, and try again.

There's no discernible difference between the network setup (ifconfig) between VPN and non-VPN runs, so that's not likely to be the issue, except that you have an en8 and en9 networks that are active, but it's not clear what they are - one has a self-assigned IPv4 address (169.254.205.179) and the other has an IPv6 address.

en8: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=404<VLAN_MTU,CHANNEL_IO>
	ether 86:89:ad:2d:76:cc
	inet6 fe80::108c:13af:ed9e:9750%en8 prefixlen 64 secured scopeid 0x17 
	inet 169.254.205.179 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 169.254.255.255
	nd6 options=201<PERFORMNUD,DAD>
	media: autoselect
	status: active
en9: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=404<VLAN_MTU,CHANNEL_IO>
	ether f6:cf:2c:f8:91:ef
	inet6 fe80::f4cf:2cff:fef8:91ef%en9 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x18 
	nd6 options=201<PERFORMNUD,DAD>
	media: autoselect
	status: active

As for the netstat commands, I should have been clearer - the statistics are cumulative, so I would expect the counts to be 0 shortly after a reboot... there hasn't been enough traffic to generate any errors (especially if error rates increase with utilization). It would be worth running netstat before and after you've experienced the problem, to see if any differences appear.

Please download and run (free) EtreCheck, and share the results to the clipboard. Then open a new reply here, and press the Additional Text button that looks like a printed page, and paste and post the hardware and software configuration report here. From that, we can get a little more detail about what is installed and what is running here.

+1 Download and run the free version of EtreCheckPro, from > https://etrecheck.com/en/index.html

Then post back here with your Report, as per > How to use the Add Text Feature When Post… - Apple Community

Remove both VPN apps, and restart.

Remove these VPN apps entirely, and don’t depend on shutting them off as a reliable means to disable.

Disable the IINA and Movist Pro extensions in Safari, and in any other browsers involved. (This to test with the built-in media players.)

Test again.

Test a Cat6 Ethernet cable and turn Wi-fi Off or move Ethernet to the top of the Service Order.

[Edited by Moderator]