[Videos] Buffering while playing from NAS (1 Viewer)

[Snoopy87]

Hi,

I had never any issues with watching my MKV files from my NAS over WiFi (WLAN-N) with MediaPortal (Moving Pictures).

Yesterday I tried to watch "The Dark Knight Rises". This was not a smll MKV file, it was the whole Blu-ray Content (m2ts) stored on my NAS. The filesize is 47 GB and the video bitrate of this movie is very high. Also the movie comes with a DTS HD audio stream.

It was impossible to watch the movie, because it took minutes to see the first frames (MediaPortal was not responsible while loading) and the it I got video frames or audio every few seconds....

First, I thought my HTPC is too slow or MediaPortal is unable to watch such a movie (video and audio bitrate).

Then I tried to copy the whole movie to an external HDD and plugged in it to my HTPC with USB 2.0 and everything workes great!

So: Could you please add a buffering like online streaming? Then it doesn't matter if the video bitrate is higher than the wifi bitrate.

 

[kiwijunglist]

This might be something to think about for mediaportal 2,

What happens when video bit rate > connection speed when playing a remote share
- buffering?
- transcoding?

 

[tourettes]

For M2TS files the source filter is responsible for the caching (LAV probaby was used?). For Blu-ray playback libbluray is responsible for the filre reads & caching.

Basicly there is not much what MP itself could do.

 

[Owlsroost]

If the (average) movie bitrate is higher than the (average) WLAN capability, no sensible amount of buffering/caching is going to help - the buffers will go empty eventually.

The purpose of buffering is to compensate for the variations in movie bitrate/network throughput/latency, not to make the impossible work....

Tony

 

[kiwijunglist]

I would agree that buffering seems pointless (I only mentioned it for the sake of options) which leaves either stuttering / crashing, or some kind of notification error, or automatic transcoding. I guess this consideration should tie into thoughts regarding DLNA / uPNP with MP2, but I think it is something worth thinking about in advance for MP2

 

[Snoopy87]

Of course buffering would help. If the movie bitrate is e.g. 35 Mbit/s and the wifi bitrate only 30 Mbit/s, buffering for XX seconds would overcome any stuttering, etc. Don't see why this would not help?

 

[Owlsroost]

In your example, 'XX' seconds would be 10 minutes per hour of movie, so for a 2 hour movie you would have to wait 20 minutes for the buffering to happen before the movie started playing, and it would need over 5GB of ram or hard disk space for the buffer.

 

[offbyone]

The bitrate of your data (or network) connection is lower than the bitrate of the file you want to play in realtime. Just think about it... imagine you want to seek... as Owlsroost outlines this is not really what you want.

 

[jonm]

A wired connection is the way to fix this, Wifi just isn't appropriate for reliably streaming HD video.