forum.excito.org

When playing video with vlc mediaplayer on windows, only using the files mounted from samba in the windows file system, there are lot of freezes.
I tried the ftp, feeding vlc with a ftp-link. It works much better, but are there
1) better methods?
2) Using the upnp protocol? Is that potentially better for media streaming than ftp?
3) What underlying protocol is upnp using?
4) How do I add upnp capabilty to vlc?

Hi,

Its a bit strange that you are experiencing freezes. How is your network setup, wireless or wired?

If you run VLC you can try to enable caching when open the file to see if that makes any difference. (When choosing file->open check the "caching" checkbox in Advanced options.

VLC should(?) be able to use UPNP but i must admit that i never got it working.

/Tor

I am using 100 mbit wired network connection. Changing the caching doesen't solve the problem. When playing from FTP with VLC there is a freeze approx. every fifth minute, can anyone explain that?

Hi again Gurriz,

I unfortunately must say that we are unable to reproduce this during normal operation. Even when doing this over Samba, it works fine here.

Do you have a lot of downloads running on Bubba when you experience this? It could be that something is eating up the resources for samba. You can try to disable any streaming software that you dont use, daap and upnp then. These services will periodacly update their media libraries which in turn uses quite a lot of resources. Further more the download manager will also use a lot of resources from time to time so that also can be a problem in some cases when resources are in short supply.

Other than than, what bandwidth is it on the media content you try to play?

/Tor

by increasing, as you advised, the vlc cache to some 10000 ms. But I am still curious why the network bandwidth go down to zero approx every 3-4 minute...

Well, I have the same problem. The rendering client can handle files when played from local harddrive, but everytime I try to stream from Bubba it freezes every 10 minutes. It works playing mp3 music from the bubba.
The rendering client is using WinXP+Media Portal and I have 100Mbit cable connection.

Hi Gurriz and Tyriel,

Sorry to hear that you are experiencing playback problems.

Are you both using Windows networking when this occurs? And what type of media are we talking about? Is it high bandwidth movies or audio?

/Tor

My problems are solved, and now I can play high bandwidth (like dvd format) movies
- by using ftp instead of samba and
- set a cache in vlc (on windows XP) to 7000 ms.