[vlc-devel] macosx: caching problem in 0.9.2

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le mardi 16 septembre 2008 04:29:52 Max Amanshauser, vous avez écrit :
> Playing content over smb over WLAN

...is probably not the best idea.

> results in audio (always) and video (sometimes) stuttering, every couple of
> seconds. Bandwidth and latency however are quite good.

Either this is not true, and/or you have packet loss - which TCP, hence CIFS, 
do not cope well with.

> In 0.8.6 stuttering was generally resolved by increasing the caching
> value for the File Access Module. In 0.9.2 this has no effect at all.

True, that is a bug in 0.9.x.

Then again, to most users, customizing file-caching is not an acceptable 
(=user-friendly) solution. Also, we get a lot more complaints about the VLC 
PTS delay being too long rather than too short. And secondly, the industry is 
slowly moving to SSD for storage, which means seeking-induced I/O glitch will 
loose significance, which means the second-long PTS delay for files will 
loose justification.

In my not-so-humble opinion, VLC should be ridden of all the *-caching 
settings and do proper delay-jitter calculation instead. In your case, that 
would cause some glitches early on, and then adapt without (power) user 
intervention.

> In 0.8.6 playback is delayed slightly after starting, because the
> cache is being filled; in 0.9.2 no such behaviour is observed and the
> stuttering continues.

0.9.2 defaults to 1 second file caching, as does 0.8.6. That being 
insufficient is quite pathological a case for a _file_system_.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://git.remlab.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=vlc-courmisch.git;a=summary