[mythtv-users] Choppy playback on remote frontend only - 2 sec prebuffering pause

David Morrison themorrisons at btconnect.com
Fri Apr 8 06:46:59 UTC 2005


Craig Read wrote:

> Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
>
>>
>> Bob Wiegand wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> Up to this point I've been running frontend and backend on
>>>> the same machine, RH9 with a PVR350 and 250. I finally have
>>>> setup another machine to be a frontend. The playback on the
>>>> new frontend pauses every 2 seconds for prebuffering in both
>>>> LiveTV and recording playback, yet they play fine on the
>>>> combo frontend/backend.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Are the files stored on the backend machine? I've had similar
>>> problems that seem to be due to poor NFS performance. If I
>>> share the drive using Samba it works - with NFS it doesn't.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> In that case, take a look at your network config. Such problems
>> point towards network config problems. Those can range from wrong
>> options used for nfs to faulty cables.
>
>
> I don't think it's his network config.
>
> I have exactly the same situation and problem. I was running 0.16
> frontend on a RH9 machine, backend running the previous version of
> knoppmyth (upgraded to 2.6.9 kernel). It ran flawlessly under
> those conditions. Under 0.17, the remote front end has choppy
> audio and audio is consistently ~2 seconds out of sync.
>
> I'm about to totally remove the remote front end and re-install to
> see if that helps.
>
> Craig...
>
>
I saw this on my 0.17 remote fe when I used a wireless 802.11b
(11Mb/s) card. Changing to a g (54 Mb/s) card made this much better,
so it can be network related. However, I still see my network card
pausing for a few seconds during playback, i.e there is frantic
activity for a five or so  seconds then a pause of 2, then activity
again. It's not a nice constant stream as I'd like. Somewhere, there's
got to be some buffer configuration (samba, NIC, MythTV, Mplayer) we
can tweak to make things smoother.

Perhaps one day we'll have RTSP in MythTV so that players like MPlayer
or VLC can actually know they are streaming over a network rather than
playing a local file. Or perhaps the next generation of Wireless cards
(108 Mb/s) are perfectly fast enough?

Dave



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