[ILUG] Streaming video

[Niall O Broin]

I've been trying to do some streaming of video from a little server and 
I'm not having much joy. The server's a miniITX box so it doesn't have 
a lot of oomph, but it should still be able to handle this. I have the 
filesystem with the AVIs exported with Samba (for ease of reading by 
all likely clients) but avi playing is very disappointing - the video 
stops completely for seconds at a time.

Clients used have been xine on SuSE 9.3, and VLC on OS-X. Just now I 
tried to watch something on the OS-X box and gave up in despair, it was 
so bad. This was over a wireless connection, but it was just as bad 
with a wired connection. I did a very unscientific test by copying a 
file from the Samba share and got a rate of 500KB/s which is 
atrociously slow BUT is still more than 3x that needed for the avi file 
concerned (350MB, 40 minutes =~ 150KB/s).

Sound keeps playing quite happily, and if I copy the entire file to the 
OS-X boxes hard drive all is sweetness and light.

I have tuned the disk on the server with hdparm to be about as good as 
it's going to be - hdparm -t gets me about 30MB/s which is rather more 
than needed for the task, and certainly means that HDD is not the 
issue.

Samba on the server I have not tuned at all but TBH it's not doing too 
badly - FTP gets about 10% faster. The wireless is 802.11b which is 
11Mb/s =~ > 1 MB/s but AIUI you'll only get about 50% of rated speed in 
real throughput, so I reckon FTP is about going full tilt.

So, why the choppy video playback? I can move 500KB/s, I need 150KB/s - 
plenty of overhead, I'd have thought.



Niall