Playing movies over network? (solved)

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

I'm trying to watch some TV Shows I've recorded on a windows share using samba

I mount the samba share and can play the moving using mplayer, but it takes forever for it to get going and then the performance is pretty slow. Playing the same movies over the wireless network in windows works fine.

Anybody have some tips on different programs to use or ways to speed mplayer up?

fcgreg · Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 8:15 am Post subject: It depends

It really depends on what factors are slowing your SAMBA/MPlayer scenario. Have you done more testing to determine what is slowing things down?

For example, if you copy the files off of the SAMBA share to your Linux system and then view it with MPlayer, does the problem go away? Any other clues?
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Greg T.

nin_freak_ · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 110

all of my movies are stored on my server, and watched over the network, via samba or nfs, and i don't have that problem, so i don't know what's going on

Kraymer · Guru Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 349 Location: Germany

Hi!
I use samba and do regularly watch movies streamed from my server's share (actually it's a relict from windows times but I guess that's not important)
What bandwith do these tv-shows need? Is it in raw avi/mpeg format? Do you have 10 or 100Mbit connection between server and client? I'd also suggest you try a local playback in order to point out if it's a bandwith or mplayer issue.. By the way you could have a look on how fast the files will be copied. If your server has some locks or other jobs or something that might stop or throttle your stream during playback you yould try to define a higher cache size for mplayer (adding 'cache = 2048' to ~/.mplayer/conf works very well for me and enables even limited skipping without a break)
Sebastian

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

I copied one of the movies over to this computer (the one with linux on it) and found the problem. The movie played fine when played off the HD, so it isn't a problem there. But when transfering over, the speed was HORRIBLE. Around 30-40K the entire time.

I'm running on gentoo-sources 2.4.20-r5

I have a d-link 650+ using the acx100 driver from acx100.sourceforge.net

Anybody have any ideas on how to speed this up?

EDIT: Also, when downloading I've gotten to around 200k

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

Just for followup,

I changed every samba setting I could and nothing worked

Then I looked at my startup script for the acx100 wireless drivers and it was setting my MTU to around 500. I set it to 1500 (default for ethernet) and the speed was great, but not so stable for some reason. I set it down to 1200 and I have great stability and speed.

fcgreg · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2003 7:04 am Post subject: Thanks for the follow-up

Thanks for the follow-up. That makes more sense (network layer problem as opposed to Samba problem).

Happy Gentoo-ing!
_________________
Greg T.